Few photographers captured 1970s rock culture as expertly as Richard E. Aaron, whose career exploded after he shot the iconic cover image for the multi-Platinum album Frampton Comes Alive!, released in early 1976.

In November that year, Aaron was assigned to shoot a record company party for Lynyrd Skynyrd at a Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs restaurant in midtown Manhattan. This image that he shot that night image perfectly encapsulates the wild unpredictability of life in that decade’s rock and roll circus.

The evening was winding down and Aaron had shot numerous rolls of film with his Nikon camera, which was fitted with a 35mm wide-angle lens and Nikon flash. As he was heading for the door, he spotted Skynyrd electric guitarist Allen Collins and drummer Artimus Pyle in a corner, polishing off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

“I’m thinking, ‘That’s a good shot,’” the photographer recalls, “but there’s something missing. I looked around and saw an organ grinder with his roller-skating monkey, who were hired to entertain at the party. I asked the organ grinder, ‘Can I borrow your monkey for a moment?’ He said, ‘Sure.’”

“I took the monkey over to the booth and sat him down with the guys. It was a funny shot, but there was still something missing. I grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels from the table and gave it to the monkey. The guys started laughing, and that’s how I got the shot.”

But did the chimpanzee actually take a slug?

“I don’t think so,” Aaron says. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

Aaron was later invited to join Lynyrd Skynyrd on the fateful tour that claimed the lives of several band and crew members in a plane crash on October 20, 1977. An assignment to photograph members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in New York prevented him from accepting Skynyrd’s offer and possibly losing his own life in the crash.

With some justice, Aaron can claim Monty Python saved his life.

Zakk Wylde says Ozzy Osbourne had plans for a new studio album before his death, and had approached him about returning to the sound of their earliest records together.

Although Wylde had several stints away from Ozzy since he replaced Jake E. Lee in 1987, he wrote for and performed on more albums with the singer than any other guitarist. His five studio albums with Ozzy eclipse the contributions of Lee and Randy Rhoads (two each), Gus G (one) and Steve Vai (one).

In the years following his exodus from the band, he returned for Ozzy's last album, Patient Number 9, which was co-written by producer Andrew Watt.

Speaking to NJ.com, Wylde says Ozzy’s vision for what would have been a 14th studio album would go back to the sound they created for 1991's No More Tears.

“He was texting me, ‘Zakk, let’s do another record, because I really loved it when you were going through your Allman Brothers, [Lynyrd] Skynyrd phase when we did No More Tears. It’s heavy but it’s more melodic, it’s not pummeling heavy,’” Wylde says.

The guitarist, who had hoped Ozzy would continue gigging after his curtain closer at Back to the Beginning, was understandably into the idea. Of course, the album never came to be, but Ozzy’s comments are tinged with a kind of ironic humor as the band had struggled to find a producer for the record. The sound of their demos failed to convince a list of producers, including Rick Rubin, who by then had worked with Slayer, Danzig and the Cult.

“I don’t worry about who’s flying the plane — I just enjoy the ride,” Wylde told Classic Rock in 2022. “I was sent to Rick’s house to get him onboard and played him basically the whole demo.

“He says, ‘Zakk, this is like a horrendous Mötley Crüe record. What we really need is some of that Sabbath Bloody Sabbath riff. We just need a whole record of that.’”

In the end, Duane Baron and John Purdell stepped up to the plate and challenged the band to make each song radio-friendly, with Ozzy admitting to CR that he had “a lot to prove.”

That approach certainly worked on "Mama, I'm Coming Home," one of its standout hits, and a track that has generated massive streaming figures since Ozzy's passing. Motörhead bass guitarist Lemmy Kilmister has a writing credit on the track, as well as on “Hellraiser.”

The album's superlative electric guitar–driven title track also helped it shift over eight million copies worldwide. Wylde explained how the tune came about.

“I had a slide with me, and I was thinking about all those bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet that I liked, which was what inspired the slide lines that I started playing — almost like a 'Freebird' feel,” he says.

Wylde said he expected he and Ozzy would have another chance to build on what they had created in 1991. While performing at Back to the Beginning, he had no thoughts that the end was near.

“I wasn’t thinking when we were doing the show that this was the last time I’m going to be doing ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ with the boss or this is the last time I’m going to play ‘Crazy Train,’” Wylde says.

But Ozzy, who had pondered death in his final months, was closer to making his exit than anyone knew.

“We did the show, he ended up finishing his book [Last Rites], they did the documentary, and then he was like, ‘All right, I’m out of here,’” Wylde concludes. “He finished everything he had to do, and then he was like, ‘All right, I’m done.’”

In related stories, Wylde has looked back on his Ozzy audition and why he beat others to the gig, as well as how his infamous bull's-eye guitar design was the result of a very happy accident.

Good southern rock band that it is, Blackberry Smoke has played many a Lynyrd Skynyrd song during its 24 years, but not "Free Bird" — until this past November 7 in St. Augustine, Florida.

The reason was in frontman Charlie Starr's hands: Gary Rossington's 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG. That’s the electric guitar the late musician used to play "Free Bird" right up until Skynyrd's tragic plane crash in 1977, and then during his subsequent tenure with the Rossington Collins Band.

"We've played tons of Skynyrd songs but left 'Free Bird’ alone...'cause it feels kinda sacred," Starr explains. "That's Skynyrd's song, y'know? It doesn't feel right to tread upon it. You don't mess around with it. That's just my opinion, and it was our opinion as a band.

"But with that guitar, I thought, Well, we have to. One of my friends actually said, 'You can't get up there and play another song on that guitar and leave 'Free Bird' out of it.' And I said, 'You're right.'" Blackberry Smoke actually performed it as a medley, with the opening, slide-guitar dominated part of "Free Bird" leading into "Tuesday's Gone."

"Metaphorically it felt appropriate to me," Starr notes. "It felt kind of special to do."

And Rossington's family is planning to have more artists have that special kind of experience with his gear.

The distribution effort is being curated by the Chicago Music Exchange, which has partnered with Rossington's widow, Dale, and their daughters Mary and Annie to care for his instruments, amplifiers and other items — about 150 total according to CME CEO Andrew Yonke. Save for Berniece, Rossington's 1959 Gibson Les Paul he named for his mother — which is currently in the possession of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — CME is housing the Rossington collection in the Vault, a special display area for historic gear that’s attached to its retail showroom.

Yonke says CME is "still actively working through his amp collection and bringing a lot of very old pre-plane crash stuff into working form." The company is also privately offering other artists the opportunity to use some of the gear as a continuing tribute to Rossington.

"From day one, the decision was always to further Gary's legacy and have more and more people get to see and play these," explains Yonke, who worked and became friends with Rossington over the years. "We're not selling anything. Everything we're doing is to provide access. Our goal is that hopefully people get to end up making records using the [Peavey] Mace amplifiers that were in the Hell House [Skynyrd’s rehearsal spot in Green Cove Springs, Florida] and get to play shows with the SGs and Les Pauls and things that Gary used."

The Rossingtons and CME were connected not long after after Rossington's March 2023 death, at the age of 71, by current Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke, a longtime friend of Rossington's who also played with the band during the early ’70s. When Medlocke and the family met up at the CMT Music Awards in April 2023 for a tribute to Rossington, he recalls, "Dale and Mary told me they didn't know what they were going to do with all of Gary's stuff — didn't know what it was worth, didn't know when he bought it, didn't know what year it was... everything from A to Z, unknown.

"I said, 'Let me help you with this. I got the guy.' I put them in touch, and Andrew did just the most incredible job of putting the whole thing together, 'cause the collection was just massive."

"Thank God I had time to spend with Gary over the years and knew the type of person he was," Yonke adds. "My first meeting with Mary and Dale, it was like we'd known each other forever, which I was so happy about, because...it was the utmost importance that the family was comfortable and excited about everything we're doing. It's been a very slow and intentional process to get us to the point of more and more people knowing what we're doing."

Yonke was also pleased, albeit not surprised, to find Rossington's collection well intact. "He wasn't a flipper. He wasn't a trader. He wasn't a collector. He acquired things over the years from different promotions or gifts from friends, and obviously his relationship with Peavey, his relationship with Gibson.

"And he didn't lose things. So we have the Marshall from the original gigs, the custom Hi-Watt 100 from back in the day, the Mace stacks he toured with, the Mace combos that he wrote and recorded those songs with. It's all here."

Besides the '61 SG that Starr played, CME also has a late-‘60s SG with a small-nut bridge that Rossington was playing during the ’70s, as well as a 1950s goldtop Les Paul that was traded between Rossington and the late Steve Gaines and had come back into the former's possession not long before the plane crash.

"The thing about Gary is these were the tools of the trade," Yonke says. "He was a songwriter and a player. When he went out on tour it was, 'Where's my SG?' and 'Where's my Les Paul?'"

Starr was "so blown and way and honored" by the playing opportunity. He was offered the '61 and the late-'60s SG, which were flown to St. Augustine in their own plane seat and accompanied by CME staffers. "I plugged the '61 in and it was just a magical feeling," Starr recalls. "It played and felt and sounded exactly like you want a guitar like that to feel. It felt so special."

Starr was also intrigued to find a small piece of large-gauge electrical wire with the guitar, which Rossington would place against the nut to raise the guitar's action for slide work. "That was his thing," Starr says. "He probably recorded 'Free Bird’ that way, and he would reach up and snatch it out of there to play the rhythm on the rest of the song. What a neat little trick. I thought, God, how long has that been in here? He hadn't had that guitar on the road in ages, probably since the ’90s. It was so cool to find it."

Yonke says CME and the Rossington estate are already offering the guitars to other players, including "some very big acts," although they're keeping mum about where they may land next. "It's not as simple as, 'Hey, bud, I got a guitar; would you like to play it?' There's a lot of moving parts involved," Yonke notes. "And there's such a rabid fan base for each and every one of these. I've had so many calls just on these Mace amplifiers. It's crazy how many artists want to know, 'Do you have the Maces?!'

"I'm a retailer. We're in the business of selling instruments, but we've built a reputation for making sure that we get things that are there to make music to other people who are making music. So knowing these instruments that created these sounds, that created an emotion; and being able to bring them out again and remind people about Gary, the type of person he was, the type of songwriter he was and what he participated in bringing out... It's impossible, really, to put that into words."

The thorny subject of the greatest guitar solo of all time has long been a fiercely contested debate, probably because every solo is different. How do you compare, say, “Comfortably Numb” with “Crazy Train,” or “Stairway to Heaven” with “Sultans of Swing”? It’s impossible. Still, public opinion ebbs and flows, and we wanted to find out which solos currently rank among our readers as the greatest of them all.

So we ran a poll on GuitarPlayer.com to find out and here we present the results. We’ll take a look at the stories behind the songs and find out just what made those lead guitar breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

20. Gary Moore | “Still Got the Blues”

GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990)

The definitive blues guitar ballad.

Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales.

Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains one of the most raw and expressive blues tracks, with Moore almost fighting his guitar at points, yet never failing to deliver the goods

19. Metallica | “Fade To Black”

GUITARIST: Kirk Hammett (1984)

Metallica’s first ballad features some of Kirk’s most epic playing.

Recorded at Flemming Rasmussen’s Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen in February and March 1984, Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s sophomore album, was more progressive and stylistically greater in scope than the all-out thrash assault of their debut, Kill ’Em All. That change is evident on “Fade to Black,” which features acoustic guitars and a nonstandard structure more akin to the “Stairway to Heaven” school of songcraft. But it is the song’s timeless melodic solo that most vividly signals a stylistic shift in guitarist Kirk Hammett’s playing. And the signature element he employs for the last solo is arpeggios.

“I have been playing that song for so long now,” Kirk tells our sister publication Total Guitar. “For the very last solo, I know how I want to start it, but then I am in an area where I can improvise for 16, 18 or 24 bars, and then [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] will hit a certain fill, which means that it’s up and it’s time for the arpeggio part. And then I just slide right into those arpeggios.” And they are arpeggios played on two strings, Hammett specifies. “When guitar players first started incorporating arpeggios into their playing, before the whole Yngwie sweep-picking thing, arpeggios were played on two strings – not three or four strings,” he explains. “And that was what the vogue was at the time in the 1980s, so I have been playing those for a long time. I use my middle finger just to anchor my position on the neck.”

That’s a great tip from the man who plays the solos. But how should you tackle them yourself? First, there are two essential scales you’ll need to know: the B natural minor scale and the B Phrygian mode, both shown below. These cover you for the entire opening 30 bars, which, let’s face it, is a lot of music, so this is a good reason to learn a couple of shapes if ever there was one.

To make it simpler, most of your time is spent in the natural minor scale. Not until around bar 20 will you find yourself briefly landing on the C note, which appears in the Phrygian mode. The bottom line is that Hammett improvises this part of the solo live – and these are the shapes he uses.

Up next are those two-string arpeggio shapes, and they’re 16th notes – all of them! At 142 bpm, it’s pretty fast, but Hammett doesn’t pick every note, opting to use pull-offs to make those rapid licks easier. It’s definitely something to experiment with and if you’re still struggling, you could try adding in an occasional hammer‑on, too.

18. Steely Dan | “Kid Charlemagne”

GUITARIST: Larry Carlton (1976)

Messin’ with the “Kid.”

Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos, but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying.

“I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself.

Despite the acclaim, Carlton was, and remains, nonplussed. “When the record came out, there was a wonderful review of the tune in Billboard and they raved about the solo,” he says. “I put the record on and listened to it with my wife, and at the end of it I said, ‘I don’t know. It just sounds like me.’”

17. Cream | “Crossroads”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song.

It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God.

Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship.

Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one” in the first verse of his second solo break, thereby throwing off his phrasing. That’s perfectionism for you. For everyone else, this four-minute track remains a source of fascination more than 50 years on.

16. Eric Johnson | “Cliffs Of Dover”

GUITARIST: Eric Johnson (1990)

Heavenly tones from the Texan great.

This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain.

“I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw him live, and his tones were the best I’d ever heard. I wondered how this guy was getting all of these sounds out of his Strat. I’d never seen anybody have such a forward-thinking rig like that.”

15. Prince | “Purple Rain”

GUITARIST: Prince (1984)

The Purple One’s defining guitar moment.

The epic outro to “Purple Rain” – which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself – stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals.

It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks.

Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes in live performance. While there are many great live renditions of this track, his half-time performance for 2007’s Super Bowl in Miami is the stuff of legend. Shredding alone onstage in the middle of a storm, Prince seemed to be living the moment for which this song was written.

14. Deep Purple | “Highway Star”

GUITARIST: Ritchie Blackmore (1972)

Race with devil on English highway.

“I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out – and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression – D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on the guitar, and I believe that that’s why it stood out and why people have enjoyed it so much.

“Over the years, I’ve always played that solo note for note, but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whisky. [Keyboardist] Jon [Lord] would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster, and he would get very annoyed about it.”

13. Guns N’ Roses | “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

GUITARIST: Slash (1988)

A game of two halves.

Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced.

Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it all together, which is the mark of any great guitar solo. Remarkably, although Slash’s riff was responsible for the song’s creation, he wasn’t fond of the song originally. “We were a pretty hard driving band, and that was sort of an uptempo ballady type of a thing,” he said. “So it’s grown on me over the years.”

12. Ozzy Osbourne | “Crazy Train”

GUITARIST: Randy Rhoads (1980)

Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback.

The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career – and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor.

There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret.

The shredder performed the solo with his customized Jackson guitar through a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s while sitting in the control room. “We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp.”

11. Michael Jackson | “Beat It”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1982)

Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing.

Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind.

Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’” And he did it for free.

10. The Beatles | “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four.

By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior.

Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are appropriately tear-jerking, weaving a dramatic narrative that builds to a shattering climax.

9. Chicago | “25 OR 6 TO 4”

GUITARIST: Terry Kath (1969)

Wah-drenched ecstasy.

This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978.

Though his superb playing graced many tracks – notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority – there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic despair.

Kath most likely played his Gibson SG Standard, as pictured on Chicago Transit Authority’s inner sleeve, using his favored string set, as revealed to GP: the high E string from a tenor set and a standard set for the rest, moved down one string (i.e. high E for the B string, B for the G string, and so on).

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd | “Free Bird”

GUITARIST: Allen Collins (1974)

The Bird is the word.

As it happens, the four-minute-and-24- second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled).

The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together, we liked the sound of the two guitars, and I could’ve gone out and played it with him. But the way he was doin’ it, he was just so hot! He just did it once and did it again, and it was done.”

7. Dire Straits | “Sultans Of Swing”

GUITARIST: Mark Knopfler

An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory.

Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler – schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz – who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads.

Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” – that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos.

The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins-style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would be enough, but the outro solo is the real attention-grabber, on which Knopfler builds to a dazzling set of spitfire 16th-note arpeggios – cleanly played, precise and rousing every time you hear it.

6. The Jimi Hendrix Experience | “All Along The Watchtower”

GUITARIST: Jimi Hendrix (1968)

The greatest solo in a cover version.

This song tops any list of covers that are better than the original. Guitarists invariably refer to it as a Hendrix cover rather than a Bob Dylan original, proof of how much Hendrix made it his own. Jimi’s rhythm playing is astounding, both in the intro and in the deft chord/ melody work of the verses, and of course, there’s the small matter of four guitar solos to consider. The man many refer to as the best of all time makes the most of his Strat and Marshall rig here, but it’s his offering at the 2:20 mark that we’re interested in. Following an opening run of octaves, he gets into his stride with a typically blues-based minor pentatonic approach in C#.

At 2:32, the main solo explodes into a trademark combination of rhythm and lead, plus funky scratching on muted strings. It’s worth playing along with the scratches, trying to keep a loose wrist and consistent down-up strumming. Those few beats alone will teach you a lot about Jimi’s groove and feel.

To get the sound, select a bridge-position single-coil pickup, dial in delay at around 350ms, add compression for sustain and opt for a Vox wah pedal or something similar. You’ll hear the wind begin to howl.

5. Eagles | “Hotel California”

GUITARISTS: Don Felder & Joe Walsh (1977)

Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights.

The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39.

As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#, so, if the higher guitar plays an F#, the lower guitar will play a D, and so on.

This nugget of information can take you a long way to mastering those descending arpeggios. We won’t go as far as to say you could easily work it out by ear, but if you know the chords to the song, it’s possible to jam along. And you can’t say that about many of the solos on this list!

4. Queen | “Bohemian Rhapsody”

GUITARIST: Brian May (1975)

It might just be the biggest rock song of all time.

Following Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death and a cameo moment in 1992’s Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a trigger point for a worldwide outpouring of affection and respect for Queen. Their renewed popularity would continue into the new millennium as Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You musical and the band’s discovery of a different way to exist behind frontman Adam Lambert brought their music to a new generation.

And “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Unsurprisingly, it’s Queen’s best-known song, and its brief nine-bar solo is a short and sweet musical interlude, bridging the verses to lead into what’s become known as the song’s “operatic section.” Those two words alone should warn you that this song shouldn’t work. There’s no chorus and, aside from two verses, no repetition. But of course it does work, and Brian May’s solo is the perfect melodic break.

His phrasing is loose and natural, moving across the backbeat rather than sticking to a rigidly timed grid. The fastest licks are expressive bursts, rather than repetitive noodling, and his articulate pre-bend and vibrato technique demonstrates his beautiful touch. Somehow, within the confines of the complex structure of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this solo is made to order.

3. Led Zeppelin | “Stairway To Heaven”

GUITARIST: Jimmy Page (1971)

Heaven-sent soloing.

From the moment Jimmy Page plays the opening run on his ’59 Fender Telecaster, right through to the flurry of notes and the wailing bend that completes it, this is guitar-solo perfection – a masterpiece of composition. Rather than wander aimlessly, Page creates a song within a song.

The opening phrases set the scene, as he adds notes to the pentatonic scale to follow the song’s final chord progression. A rapid mid-solo repeating lick raises the bar before a game of question-and-answer with a haunting overdubbed guitar leads into that last flurry and bend. As we say, it’s all about the composition: licks that track the chord changes, the contour of the melody and the pacing of the widdly bits all take the listener on a journey.

Three takes were recorded (the other two allegedly still survive, presumably locked in a Led Zeppelin vault somewhere), all of them improvised, although Page has reportedly said that he had worked out the opening line. But while we’re all certainly curious to hear those solos, let’s face it: They’re not going to be any better than the one we’ve come to know and love all these years.

2. Van Halen | “Eruption”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1978)

Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world.

With its mix of fast legato hammer‑ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mind-blowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon.

Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.”

His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are a bluesy affair, whose virtuoso legato licks perhaps recall the mojo of Jimmy Page’s breakdown solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a theme Eddie develops over the following eight bars, taking notes from the major and minor pentatonic scales to add chromatics.

His tapping finale is probably one of the least understood solo sections in rock history. Eddie’s taps are not always on the beat, which makes for tricky timing changes as he switches from tapping the first and fourth sextuplet notes to the third and sixth notes. From start to end, “Eruption” is a masterpiece that would take most guitarists a lifetime to perfect.

1. Pink Floyd | “Comfortably Numb”

GUITARIST: David Gilmour (1979)

Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves.

In a 1992 interview with MTV’s Ray Cokes, Gilmour was asked what he thinks of Keith Richards’ theory that songs, lyrics and guitar solos are “just out there in the air and you sort of grab them.” Gilmour agreed. “I think he’s right. They sort of appear as if they are out there in the air. But I don’t know how they get there.” But the best ones he said, just happen. “The best ones do, but often you work very hard and struggle over them.”

Gilmour's two "Comfortably Numb" solos are certainly among his best, and it’s easy to understand why our readers voted his efforts to be the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of those two solos qualifies for inclusion? Whichever way you go — and granted, most fans prefer the first solo to the second — there's certainly plenty to justify the song's position at the top.

The tone is legendary. Gilmour’s signal chain consisted of his iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that he could hold notes as long as he wanted. As in his live rig, he combined a WEM 4x12 cab with a Yamaha rotary speaker lower in the mix, to add subtle modulation. The epic delay was added in the mix.

The first solo, in D major, uses the Strat’s neck and bridge pickups together, permitted by a custom switching arrangement. His phrasing here is the more unconventional of the two, with arpeggios and sliding passages. Gilmour’s use of the bar for vibrato – aided by its shortened tremolo arm – again distinguishes him from typical bluesers, inspiring many a fusion player in the process. He rakes into the beginning of many of the phrases, similar to Brian May, extracting all the excitement he can from every note.

By comparison, the outro solo’s licks are more standard, with phrases similar to Hendrix’s. The passages at 4:57 and 5:12 could be from “All Along the Watchtower” or “Foxey Lady,” but in this epic track few listeners would make the connection. It sounds both masterful and improvised at the same time. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The result is stunningly well written, with a combination of repetition and development that keeps the excitement building for two minutes. The Hendrix-style blues lick returns at 5:27, longer and more intricate than before. The aggressive double-stops first appear at 5:15, and by 5:35 he has turned that idea into a motif.

For the climax, Gilmour shoots up an octave just when it seems he’s wrung every inch of expression from his maple neck. He descends back down the neck, incorporating one of his spectacular three-fret bends on the way, and finishes with another take on that double stop motif. It has all the excitement of an improvised performance, and all the structure of a careful composition.

Both solos share brilliant rhythmic awareness. Gilmour uses triplets, sextuplets, 16th and 32nd notes freely, within the same phrase. And check out the effect at 5:10 when he plays a lick in 16th notes and then immediately repeats and expands in sextuplets. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Nowadays, it’s hard to think of Steve Morse not being a pillar of the guitar community. He’s been a music industry mainstay for nearly five decades with a CV that notes the Dixie Dregs, Kansas, Deep Purple, and Lynyrd Skynyrd among his employers throughout an illustrious career.

But there were two occasions when he was on the verge of quitting music for good, and it took the efforts of two of those bands to save him.

As Morse explains in the latest episode of Ernie Ball’s String Theory video series, the first instance was around 1981 after Dixie Dregs, the band with which he made his name, broke up.

By that point, Morse felt that “the music industry was a little bit too weird for me.” He needed to escape.

“So,” he says, “I started doing some odd jobs. Running a bulldozer, cutting hay for people, stuff like that. Not trying to work as a musician.”

Thankfully, he admits “it didn't last too long because I felt like I really missed it.” So, a compromise was needed. “I had to figure out something to do to eat,” he says.

“Phil Walden from Capricorn Records was very encouraging for me to make my own band,” the guitarist continues. “Whatever the problems were in the past, ‘do your own thing.’

“I thought if I had a trio I could manage everything and get through the lead times better. It would be a real workout for me, musically, but that's something I relished. So we did the Steve Morse band for years, [but] we kinda burned out.”

Burnout is sadly a recurring theme for Morse, but it was here that Kansas came to his rescue.

It was 1986, and Kansas were reforming after a three-year hiatus. What was initially presented as an invitation to help write a song for what would become 1986’s LP, Power, quickly snowballed and saw Morse turning on his inclination to quit the industry.

“I got the opportunity to work on a song with Kansas,” he recalls, “which turned into more songs, then a tour and an album.”

Another album, 1988's In the Spirit of Things, and another tour followed, with Morse very much in the spirit of being in Kansas.

However, burnout and the cyclical nature of rock n' roll soon ground the guitarist down. Once more, Morse looked for an out road.

So, instead of being part of a band that flew around the world, he transitioned into being the one doing the flying, as a commercial airline co-pilot.

With that as his job, he says: “I could record whatever I want. I could make music without having to worry about pleasing anybody in the business end. That really appealed to me.”

Thus, his first solo album, High Tension Wires, was born; a record from the heart and not from the marketing rulebook.

“The whole intent of that was to [tell the] record company people ‘I don't care’: I'm gonna make my living. If this sells that's one thing, but I'm here to make music and that's it.”

That carefree attitude was crucial for an industry-cynical Morse. Suddenly he was writing for writing’s sake. However, his work as a pilot took up more and more of his time, and Morse came to an extremely sobering realization.

“Getting that job was a big challenge and I really enjoyed it,” he says. “But once I did it and did it repetitively I realized that every job has things you don't like about it. Sometimes you just have to deal with stuff.”

With these thoughts as a backdrop, he received a call from Gary Rossington: Lynyrd Skynyrd were rolling into Atlanta and they wanted him to join the party.

Says Morse: “I remember coming back from a long, long day that started at 2 a.m. I still had my uniform on and on the phone was Gary Rossington.”

They were playing the city’s Omni Coliseum and, as Morse remembers it, Rossington told him, “‘Man, you gotta come down, bring your guitar, we're recording tonight.’”

Morse protested; his long, tiring day and freshly cut hair his reasons. He was no longer a rock star.

Rossington simply repeated himself: “Bring your guitar, I'll see you at six.”

In the end, Morse half obliged: He came with his guitar, but at that point, the band was already entertaining the Omni’s 16,500-strong crowd.

“Gary gets the message that I'm here,” Morse details. “He says [to the crowd] ‘Alright everybody, we're gonna bring up Steve Morse to play a song called Gimme Back My Bullets.’ Somebody pushed me on stage and there's an amp I've never plugged into before.”

What followed was captured on the band’s live album, Southern by the Grace of God, and it sparked something in Morse that has never since extinguished.

“I said ‘If it's ever it's gonna be this cool again, I should get back into music full-time because this is awesome.’ Having guys that remember me and being part of something, it's special.”

Since then, Morse's career has gone from strength to strength, with a 28-year stint in Deep Purple and his more progressive endeavors with Flying Colors two clear highlights.

His influence in the industry can't be downplayed, either. In 2022, John Petrucci praised his talents, telling Guitar Player: “There are moments that you can pinpoint and say they were truly life-changing, and for me, hearing Steve Morse play guitar was one of them.”

This article was first published in Guitar Player, in March 1999. It is reprinted in its original form here in tribute to Gary Rossington who died on 5 March, 2023. "If I leave here tomorrow/Would you still remember me?/For I must be traveling on now/Cause there's too many places I've got to see…"

Since its appearance on Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1974 debut album, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd, "Free Bird" has become a rock classic. The emotional eulogy to Duane Allman has charted millions of radio plays, and is perhaps the all-time song request screamed at bar bands by rowdy, drunken crowds. "Freeeeeeee Bird!"

When Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington performs "Free Bird", he plays his original cherry '61 Gibson Les Paul/SG Standard with side-pull vibrato. He plugs his guitar directly into the rig he has used since the '70s: a Peavey Mace amp head and a Peavey 4x12 cabinet (with the back removed to produce a more open sound) loaded with JBL speakers. This very same rig survived the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and singer Cassie Gaines.

Players wishing to emulate Rossington's chillingly beautiful slide performance on "Free Bird" will need more than good ears and decent chops. A couple of subtle, but essential "tricks" are part of the recipe for a truly convincing tone. Here, Rossington reveals the history and the mystery behind one of rock's most enduring solos.

"Around 1970, when we wrote the song, I had just started playing slide," explains Rossington. "Allen [Collins, guitarist] had these chords, but Ronnie couldn't figure out any melody or lyrics to go with them. We kept playing the chords over and over, until Ronnie figured out some lyrics, and I came up with the slide part. But when I played, the bottle kept clinking against the frets because the strings were too low. 

"I took a screwdriver, of all things, and stuck it under the strings up at the nut, so it would raise the strings up like a steel guitar. Then, I tuned the B string down to G – so the G and the B strings were both tuned to G. With the two Gs, it creates a drawling, doubled sound. These days, I use two Dean Markley .017-gauge G strings for the third and second strings to make the sound more consistent, and, instead of the screwdriver, I use a little piece of wire about five inches long. 

"That's the whole trick. I don't really need to use that little wire anymore, but I just do it out of sentimental reasons. I've never played that song live without it -- it just reminds me of the way I did it originally. It's like Jimi Hendrix on 'All Along the Watchtower.' He played the slide solo with a Zippo lighter. He couldn't get it to sound right with a steel slide or a bottle, so he used a Zippo. Each guy has his own little tricks.

"For a slide, I've always used a glass Coricidin bottle, just like Duane Allman. He told me that a bottle sounds different than a steel slide, and I think it does, so I copied him. Duane was one of my heroes and, in my opinion, he was the best slide player who ever lived. He had such a great touch. He was always on pitch -- never sharp or flat -- and that's hard to do.

"I use the slide on my middle finger. I used to wear it on my pinky so I could use the other fingers to fret with, but I just never had the 'touch,' as I call it. When it was on my pinky I would play out of tune because I couldn't see the frets as well as when the slide was on my middle finger.

"When I play the slide part, I start on the third string, slide up to the 12th fret, and take it from there. I hit the third and second strings together and play them like they're one string -- it's the same idea as a 12-string guitar. For the jam at the end, I pull out the wire and play the rhythm part. I just have to make sure that I don't hit the B string when I'm playing the chords.

"I don't know what inspired me to tune my guitar to E-A-D-G-G-E, or to use the screwdriver to raise the strings. I just remember that I wanted to do something a little different from the same old slide guitar sound, so I came up with this unique kind of invention. I thought it was cool."

Special thanks to Rossington guitar tech Rob Corsie for background information and technical details. This interview first appeared in Guitar Player magazine, March 1999.

Zakk Wylde knew he had big shoes to fill when he joined Ozzy Osbourne’s band in 1987. Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee had preceded him as Ozzy’s guitarists, and each had proven influential to his own playing. Wylde quickly found his footing, both as Osbourne’s guitarist and songwriting foil, co-creating the nine cuts on the singer’s 1988 album, No Rest for the Wicked. But perhaps no song in their shared canon stands as tall as No More Tears, the title track from Ozzy’s 1991 album, the second studio effort to feature Wylde. 

A large part of the record’s success was Wylde’s distinctive guitar work, a mix of grinding riffs and his signature pinch harmonics. But as the guitarist points out, it was all done in service of the song. “The song always comes first for Ozzy,” he says. “That was an important reminder for me when it came to making No More Tears.”

As Wylde recalls, No More Tears virtually wrote itself in rehearsals for the album sessions with bassist Mike Inez, drummer Randy Castillo and keyboardist John Sinclair. “Mike was actually the instigator of the whole song,” Wylde explains. “He came up with the bass line. Then Randy came in on the drums, exactly like it was on the record. They were just jamming on that groove, and then, again just like the record, John Sinclair came in with the keyboard line, so it was already sounding really great from the moment it was created.

“I had a slide with me, and I was thinking about all those bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet that I liked, which was what inspired the slide lines that I started playing — almost like a Freebird feel. What’s funny is that the way we jammed it is almost exactly how it came out on the record.”

Osbourne was quick to see the potential in what they had created. “Ozzy started singing some words as we were working through it, and then I came up with the riffs that answered his lines,” Wylde explains. The crescendo leading into the solo took a little more work. “We took some time to figure out how to go into that big change in the middle for the buildup and then break down before my solo. It was all routined before we got into the studio.

“I’d started to come up with some ideas on the piano, and John was playing around with different inversions on the synth. I think it’s really arresting the way that everything just drops out and then comes back with the piano. It takes the song somewhere else for a moment.”

Despite Inez’s role in the song’s creation, the bass part was recorded by Ozzy’s longtime collaborator, Bob Daisley. As for Wylde, he knew that he had to pull something special out of the bag.

“I was wondering where I was going to go with the solo,” he says. “It’s a blues-based syncopated solo, but I really sat and worked on the crescendo parts to get something that totally clicked.”

Wylde is a big fan of the written guitar solo, where the nuances are pre-planned and carefully constructed. “That’s the Randy Rhoads school of soloing, where you sit and compose the solo. Things like Hotel California or You Shook Me All Night Long — you can’t play the song without playing the solo exactly as it was recorded. I usually get a homework CD of a track so I can work on it until I get something I’m happy with.”

The gear that Wylde used for the song was his standard rig at that time. “It was just my Les Paul through a Marshall JCM800 2203 amp and cabinets fitted with 75-watt Celestions. The solo was just the one guitar. I didn’t double-track or anything. I didn’t use anything too fancy for the Ozzy records.”

Considering that No More Tears tracks in at more than seven minutes, Wylde was as surprised as anyone when it was chosen to be a single. He was even more shocked when the nearly six-minute edited version became a hit.

“I couldn’t believe something even that long could be a single,” he says. “But hell, what do I know? I didn’t think it was an exceptional track when we finished it. [The No More Tears cut] Mama, I’m Coming Home stood out as an obvious single. I sure as hell didn’t realize this would be the one song that people would always ask me about.”

The following story originally appeared in the March 1999 issue of Guitar Player.

Since its appearance on Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1973 debut album, (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd), Free Bird has become a rock classic. The emotional eulogy to Duane Allman has charted millions of radio plays, and is perhaps the all-time song request screamed at bar bands by rowdy, drunken crowds. “Freeeeeeee Bird!”

When Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington performs Free Bird these days, he plays his original cherry '61 Gibson Les Paul/SG Standard with side-pull vibrato. He plugs his guitar directly into the rig he has used since the '70s: a Peavey Mace amp head and a Peavey 4x12 cabinet (with the back removed to produce a more open sound) loaded with JBL speakers. 

This very same rig survived the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and singer Cassie Gaines.

Players wishing to emulate Rossington's chillingly beautiful slide performance on Free Bird will need more than good ears and decent chops. A couple of subtle, but essential tricks are part of the recipe for a truly convincing tone. Here, Rossington reveals the history and the mystery behind one of rock's most enduring solos. 

“Around 1970, when we wrote the song, I had just started playing slide,” explains Rossington. “Allen [Collins, guitarist] had these chords, but Ronnie couldn't figure out any melody or lyrics to go with them. We kept playing the chords over and over, until Ronnie figured out some lyrics, and I came up with the slide part. But when I played, the bottle kept clinking against the frets because the strings were too low. 

“I took a screwdriver, of all things, and stuck it under the strings up at the nut, so it would raise the strings up like a steel guitar. Then, I tuned the B string down to G – so the G and the B strings were both tuned to G. With the two Gs, it creates a drawling, doubled sound. These days, I use two Dean Markley .017-gauge G strings for the third and second strings to make the sound more consistent, and, instead of the screwdriver, I use a little piece of wire about five inches long. That's the whole trick.

“I don't really need to use that little wire anymore, but I just do it out of sentimental reasons. I've never played that song live without it – it just reminds me of the way I did it originally. It's like Jimi Hendrix on All Along the Watchtower. He played the slide solo with a Zippo lighter. He couldn't get it to sound right with a steel slide or a bottle, so he used a Zippo. Each guy has his own little tricks.

“For a slide, I've always used a glass Coricidin bottle, just like Duane Allman. He told me that a bottle sounds different than a steel slide, and I think it does, so I copied him. Duane was one of my heroes and, in my opinion, he was the best slide player who ever lived. He had such a great touch. He was always on pitch – never sharp or flat – and that's hard to do.

“I use the slide on my middle finger. I used to wear it on my pinky so I could use the other fingers to fret with, but I just never had the 'touch,' as I call it. When it was on my pinky I would play out of tune because I couldn't see the frets as well as when the slide was on my middle finger.

“When I play the slide part, I start on the third string, slide up to the 12th fret, and take it from there. I hit the third and second strings together and play them like they're one string – it's the same idea as a 12-string guitar. For the jam at the end, I pull out the wire and play the rhythm part. I just have to make sure that I don't hit the B string when I'm playing the chords.

“I don't know what inspired me to tune my guitar to E-A-D-G-G-E, or to use the screwdriver to raise the strings. I just remember that I wanted to do something a little different from the same old slide guitar sound, so I came up with this unique kind of invention. I thought it was cool.”

Back in 1993, Johnny Van Zant wrote “The Last Rebel,” a song for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s album of the same name. Its lyrics paint a picture of a defiant but tired soldier left on a battlefield: “You can see the shadow of his past written in his eyes... His friends are all gone.” Coming from a band that sang about “Sweet Home Alabama” – and did so with a decidedly southern accent – the impetus seemed obvious. But in fact, “the boy with his old guitar” who’s “got a dream that will never die” was actually someone closer to home for the singer.

“That one was about Gary,” Van Zant explains. Gary Rossington, Skynyrd’s mainstay guitarist, was the only founding member to be part of the group’s entire active career, until his death on March 5 at the age of 71 after long-term health issues, primarily heart-related, took their toll.

“I just started thinking about Gary being the last of the three who started this band,” continues Van Zant, who’s been Skynyrd’s frontman since 1987, filling the shoes of his brother Ronnie, who was killed in the October 1977 plane crash that put the band in dry dock for a decade. “We made it into him being a soldier. That was my thought with that song: He was one of the soldiers, and he fought through to the end. He was the last rebel, man. Forever.”

There’s no question that, at the time of his death, Rossington was the heart and soul of Lynyrd Skynyrd, even if his health prevented him from joining the band onstage regularly during the past couple of years. He began playing with Ronnie Van Zant and late Skynyrd guitarist Allen Collins during the mid ’60s and was the force behind Skynyrd’s resumption back in 1987. He saw the group through its 14 studio albums and numerous live sets and compilations. Rossington was writing up until the end, too, penning material for a proposed farewell album that, so far, is represented only by the aptly named 2020 single “Last of the Street Survivors.”

“I didn’t mean to be the last original, or the last man standing, but here it is,” Rossington said back in 2018, when Skynyrd announced the album and a planned two-year farewell tour that was scuttled by the COVID-19 pandemic. But that role resonated with Rossington, and he felt a purpose in playing the music he’d created with Van Zant, Collins and other deceased bandmates such as bassist-turned-third-guitarist Ed King, drummer Bob Burns, bassists Larry Junstrom and Leon Wilkeson, keyboardist Billy Powell and guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister/backup vocalist Cassie Gaines, who were also killed in the 1977 plane crash.

“It’s heavy,” Rossington acknowledged at the time. “I’m just happy to still be doing it, going out and spreading the word about Skynyrd and all the great songs, and talking about Ronnie and Allen and Steve Gaines, and Leon and Billy and all the guys we lost, just keeping them alive. And every time we play, I feel the other guys’ spirits with us, and they’re helping and making sure everything is all right. So I feel like there’s a whole bunch of people up on that stage.”

Through the group’s many incarnations, Rossington’s presence was the essential tie to the band’s legacy, a black-clad, hat-wearing, Les Paul-slinging embodiment of credibility, speaking softly but hitting hard with his guitar, whether it was the fire of “Free Bird” or the aching gentleness of “Simple Man.”

“Gary Rossington played a very integral part in the creation of all of that,” notes Rickey Medlocke, the Blackfoot founder who played drums in Skynyrd circa 1970-’71 and rejoined as a guitarist in 1996. “His presence and his talent was a very important part of the music and that band. If you go back into the early years when I first joined the band, just watching those two guys, Gary and Allen, work on those parts and the dual leads that would become great songs later on... It was Gary’s sound and the tone and his connection with Ronnie in writing the songs that brought it all together.”

Adds Van Zant, “I always thought Gary played like he acted. He was a shy guy, kinda quiet, and he had that mysterious quality, playing guitar with the long, drawn-out sustain. And the riffs he came up with and his leads were always like his personality. You could really hear the guy in his playing.”

Born in Jacksonville, Rossington found his first passion in baseball, playing sandlot and in organized leagues, with aspirations to one day join the New York Yankees. He actually met Van Zant and Burns through the sport, playing on different teams. They became interested in music as teens, however, and wound up playing the Rolling Stones’ then-current single “Time Is on My Side” in the carport of Burns’ home, the same day Van Zant had struck the drummer with a pitched ball.

“The music was changing us,” recalled Rossington, who was raised by his single mother in West Jacksonville after his father died, shortly after Gary was born. She fronted the eight dollars for his first guitar, a Sears and Roebuck Silvertone, and he later named a prized 1959 Les Paul “Berniece” after her. (It now resides in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.) “We still loved baseball, but we were connecting with the Stones, the Beatles – what we were hearing on the radio.”

And, he acknowledged with a laugh, “The girls were starting to like the rock stars better than the jocks. So there was that.”

With bassist Larry Junstrom, they formed the Noble Five, which became the One Percent before taking the name Lynyrd Skynyrd from Leonard Skinner, the strict gym teacher at Robert E. Lee High School who suspended Rossington for having long hair. Van Zant’s father, Lacy, cajoled administrators into letting the maverick aspiring rock star back into school, although Rossington ultimately dropped out to concentrate on the band.

Jacksonville had a vibrant music scene, recalls Medlocke, who got his music jones from his grandfather Paul “Shorty” Medlocke, a touring bluegrass musician. There was a preponderance of teen clubs – the Woodstock Youth Center, the Good Shepherd, the Riverside Women’s Club – as well as the Comic Book, which was all ages until midnight, when the kids were sent home and the liquor came out.

“Ronnie’s mom and dad would come out to my granddad’s dances, so that’s how I knew Ronnie – and then got to know Gary,” Medlocke says. “We all played the teen centers, and we intermingled with each other. You were able to trade conversations back and forth of who you were into, who you liked at the time, what record was out that was best. With Gary, it was all about the music. Nothing else. That’s how we all bonded.”

Exerting a particular influence on Rossington at the time was Paul Kossoff, then playing lead guitar with Free. “We saw them live once,” he remembered. “We saw them play right up close, and they just blew our minds. That’s when we really got serious about playing and working hard. We worked every day and night after that, so they helped us make it and were such an influence on us. And I just love ’em to death.”

Medlocke, meanwhile, had a front-row seat to that impact. “Paul Kossoff was so huge for Gary,” he says. “He had a 1959 Gibson Les Paul. Well, Gary ended up getting a ‘59 Les Paul. And then out of that Gary created his own thing that was a very integral part of Lynyrd Skynyrd: the sound.”

There were other sources of course, including the then-burgeoning Allman Brothers Band that was planting a flag for the South in rock and roll in a different manner than the likes of Little Richard and Sun Records’ Tennessee gang – Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.

But Rossington claimed that the idea of southern rock as a genre was not intentional on Skynyrd’s part. “We were just rock and roll, y’know?” he explained. “We were labeled southern rock through writers. ’Cause all of a sudden a lot of southern bands were doing great – us and the Allmans, Charlie [Daniels], Wet Willie, Marshall Tucker, the Atlanta Rhythm Section – it was a whole new scene taking off down here, and they needed to give it a name. I was proud to be from the South. We always were. But we didn’t think about the South as part of the sound. It’s just who we were.”

The southern heritage did come with baggage, though. “We showed the Confederate flag when we started out,” Rossington acknowledges. “We didn’t mean any kind of harm or hard feelings or anything racist. It was just ’cause we were a southern band, and we were just really proud of that, and [the flag] was more a part of the culture down there. But when it started to upset people we understood, so we stopped using it.”

Skynyrd were one of Jacksonville’s most popular bands by 1970, when they headed to Quinvy Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, to record early demos, including a first crack at “Free Bird.” Later, the group checked into the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studios with Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section guitarist Jimmy Johnson and bassist David Hood, the studio’s co-founders, who Medlocke says “really showed us what the difference between recording and playing live was all about. We really cut our teeth in there.” The band members were also still finding their way as songwriters. “We used a lot of D - C - G progressions,” Rossington told Guitar World in 1993. “It’s all about what you do with them.”

It was at Muscle Shoals, in fact, that “Free Bird” began to take flight. After some experimentation Collins found the chords for “the slow part,” as Rossington calls the song’s first half, which is how Skynyrd began to play the song in the clubs. The lyrics were inspired by a conversation Collins had with his wife, which was ultimately fleshed out by Ronnie Van Zant.

“Ronnie could never quite come up with a melody, but Allen kept playing it over and over again, and it finally clicked with Ronnie,” remembers Medlocke, who was playing drums during the sessions. “It was a magic moment.” Except, he explains, “It was actually a love song and they played it like that, and it never quite went over.”

Van Zant came up with the idea to extend the end, according to Rossington, who created the chord pattern that he and Collins began soloing over. It was the frontman who urged them to keep stretching it out.

“To us it was just a love song, and it had a lot of great guitar playing at the end for me and Allen to do,” Rossington said years later. “But it was really just a simple love song he wrote. We didn’t know it would do anything like it did, but it was mind-blowing. And it just hit.”

In 1972, the group’s onstage ferocity hooked Al Kooper, a music impresario from New York City who had played with Bob Dylan – most famously as the organist on “Like a Rolling Stone” – and founded the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, among other groups. “I heard them play for six nights in a row at a bar [Funochio’s in Atlanta],” recalled Kooper, who at the time had launched a label called Sounds of the South. “And by the sixth night, I offered to sign them.”

Skynyrd was aware of Kooper’s reputation and seduced by his stories. ”We were Hendrix freaks, and [Kooper] had played with him [on Electric Ladyland], so we wanted to hear everything we could about him,” Rossington said. Despite a lot of head-banging between their sensibilities, Kooper produced Skynyrd’s first three albums, all of which hit the Top 30 on the Billboard 200 and ultimately went Platinum, or better.

“He had a lot of ideas, but we just kinda had a band and we had all the songs written,” Rossington said. “We argued a lot, because he wanted to put in different things and different techniques or keyboard parts. We locked horns with him a few times. Ronnie and him would argue about things, and me and Allen Collins would write our own leads and have it down pat what we thought was best for the song, and [Kooper] would say, ‘No, go out and play it different’ or ‘Do this.’

“I remember on ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ Ed King did the solo and the song is in D, but Ed played it in the key of G, which worked but sounds a little different. And him and Al Kooper fought for days about that. [Kooper] hated that solo and Ed liked it, and they fought over that for a while. But it all worked out, and turns out it’s a great solo.”

There was also some drama around “Simple Man” from the band’s 1973 debut, (Pronounced ’Lĕh-’nérd ’Skin-’nérd), which Rossington wrote with Van Zant and considered one of his all-time Skynyrd favorites. “[Kooper] didn’t want us to do that song. He didn’t think it went anywhere and didn’t say much,” Rossington said. “But we loved it. So he had to go to New York on a quick weekend one time, and we recorded ‘Simple Man’ without him there. And when he got back he heard it and went, ‘Oh, wow, that’s great. Let’s do it,’ and he played organ on it, so it worked out in the end.”

“I really enjoyed the time I spent with them and the music that they made,” says Kooper, who will join Skynyrd in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. “And I think they were grateful. They had been with a couple of people before me and it didn’t work out, and it worked out this time.”

After those first three albums, however, Skynyrd hit a creative malaise due to a combination of booze, drugs and exhaustion from heavy touring, including opening for the Who. Ed King departed in 1975. That left Rossington and Collins to make Gimme Back My Bullets, Skynyrd’s lowest-selling album to date, as a two-man unit. But the addition of Gaines, who was suggested by his sister, fired things back up just in time for the group’s landmark 1976 live album, One More From the Road.

“Me and Allen were just getting by with it and doing all right with it, but we missed that third guitarist for double leads and more power-packed rhythms and stuff,” Rossington said. Skynyrd actually had several songs written quickly for a new studio album, but, Rossington noted, “We were due to do an album, and our new producer, Tommy Dowd, had [engineered] Live Cream and Wheels of Fire and a bunch of other [concert records], so it seemed like a live album was a good idea.

“We had just gotten Steve a month or two before, so he was really new and hadn’t played that much with us, and some of the songs we hadn’t gotten around to teaching him yet.” Rossington laughed at the memory. “He’d just jam along or play what he knew of ’em, and it was great and we all loved him for that. It was nerve-wracking, but it worked out better than we could’ve hoped.”

Coming in the wake of live album hits by Kiss, Peter Frampton and Bob Seger, One More From the Road was a Top 10, triple-Platinum smash, with an 11-and-a-half-minute version of “Free Bird” that eclipsed its studio predecessor, and was even a Top 40 hit.

Skynyrd took that momentum into 1977’s Street Survivors, arguably the band’s best studio effort and its highest-charting title, reaching number five. The free bird was flying high when the Convair CV-240 airplane transporting the band to a show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, crashed near Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, assistant tour manager Dean Kilpatrick and the two pilots. The rest of the band and crew suffered severe injuries. As far as Rossington was concerned, “we were through. There was no way to still be Lynyrd Skynyrd without Ronnie and Steve and Cassie. It just wouldn’t be right.”

After a bit of time, Rossington and Collins launched the Rossington Collins Band, which released two albums and disbanded in 1982. Rossington and his wife, Dale Krantz-Rossington, started the Rossington Band, which released another two albums, but the guitarist gradually warmed to the idea of putting Skynyrd back together.

“The last thing we did together as a group was have a plane crash. We’d like to go out on a better note than that,” Rossington explained in 1987, as he, Powell, Wilkeson, Ed King and drummer Artimus Pyle regrouped for a tour, with Johnny Van Zant singing. Collins had been paralyzed in a 1986 car crash but served as a co-musical director for the troupe. The trek was designed as a one-off tribute tour but quickly became a full-scale resumption that led to nine more studio albums and some rather characteristically heavy road work.

“I never dreamed it would go on this long,” Rossington said 20 years later. “We really thought it was over after [the crash]. But we got a lot of fan mail and stuff saying, ‘Please keep going, we love having you back.’ And there were so many promoters saying they were getting a lot of requests. We decided that if we could write together, get something happening that was good and new, then maybe we could go on.”

Van Zant, who put aside a new solo record deal to take part in that initial tour, says now, “I think there was unfinished business there for Gary and the other guys. Of course it was very scary, and very intimidating. The first thing I told them was, ‘Listen, I can’t be Ronnie. I’m gonna be me,’ and they said that’s what they wanted. And it worked out.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991 was the band’s first studio album since Street Survivors and the first of a streak of new music that’s so far run through 2012’s Last of a Dyin’ Breed. Four years after that, Rossington and his wife made their own album, Take It on Faith, their first outing outside of Skynyrd since the Rossington Band’s second album, in 1988. Produced by David Z, the set featured an all-star lineup of players, including the late Richie Hayward of Little Feat fame, Delbert McClinton, Bekka Bramlett, Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Winans and others, as well as songs co-written by ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons.

“It was just spontaneous,” Rossington said shortly before its release. “It only took a couple of weeks of recordings and a few overdubs and we were done. I got to use my Dobro on a song, and then I actually took a few different guitars up there to play in Nashville. I didn’t use my Les Paul a lot – maybe on half of it. I tried to get some different kinds of sounds, to sound different than Skynyrd. It was such a fun thing to do.”

Rossington had already begun having heart problems by that time, and some Skynyrd dates had to be canceled during the previous year after he suffered a heart attack. But the guitarist had no interest in succumbing to those health issues and dialing down. “I just take every day on faith,” he said. “I guess when it’s my time, I’m ready. I’d rather be playing and living life up than… Like Neil Young said, it’s better to burn out than to fade away. I’d rather just burn out in the next 10 years than sit in a rocking chair and look at the trees blowing in the wind. It’s just in my blood, y’know?

“I’m just an old guitar player, and we’ve spent our whole lives and the 10,000 hours of working to understand how to play and do it. So I think once you’ve got something going for yourself, you should keep it up and keep your craft going. When you retire, what’s next? I like to fish, but how much of that can you do, right? So I want to keep doing what I do now.”

Krantz-Rossington agreed. ”After Gary’s [2015] problem, we really had a serious talk about just letting it go for now and being happy to be alive,” she says. “But after a few days, he was just miserable, and he said to me, ‘I would much rather go out kickin’ it than sitting here in my chair.’ And that was the last time we talked about it. After that we just decided to ask for God’s mercy and do it till we drop.”

“Gary was a trouper, man,” Medlocke adds. “The guy was a tough individual.” Even when Rossington was off the road, he and Van Zant consulted with him as an active part of the band’s leadership, reporting in from the road, going over set lists and other arrangements. Van Zant’s usual salutation was, “Captain Kirk? Spock calling,” while Medlocke would discuss their shared passion for The Andy Griffith Show and Gunsmoke reruns. “He was still part of the band, even if he wasn’t there,” Van Zant says.

Both Van Zant and Rossington himself had said there would be no Skynyrd without the guitarist, with Rossington predicting, “I think it’s gonna have to end when I’m gone – not that I’m so great, but because of all the legalities and stuff.” But less than a month after his passing, the band, along with Krantz-Rossington, issued a statement that Skynyrd would indeed continue, with the approval of all other interested parties.

“I’ve been here over 27 years now,” Medlocke, says. “I’ve been here to see quite a few members move on, pass away, and it doesn’t get any easier. We had been at a crossroads several times about whether to go on or whatever, and we had always maintained that it wasn’t about each individual or anything like that. It was about the music that was created by those guys – Ronnie, Gary, Allen. So we made the decision to carry on with the music because, bottom line, the music is what is important.”

Van Zant confesses that “my heart was so broken that I couldn’t imagine going on,” but other voices intervened. “Talking to the estates and various people and talking to fans, I’m like, ‘Oh God, yeah, they’re counting on me to carry this on.’ Y’know, what kept me going was calling [Rossington] and having these conversations. He was my cheerleader. So now I’m gonna have to remember his voice to keep my spirits up and keep me going.”

What lies ahead for Skynyrd is open-ended. Van Zant and Medlocke talk about finishing an album, which would include other songs Rossington co-wrote. But mostly they want to honor their last rebel as well as those that went before him. And they flip a big middle finger to those who would say they can’t.

“People have beat us up over the years: ‘Ah, you guys ain’t nothin’ but a freakin’ tribute band,’ and ‘blah, blah, blah,’” Medlocke says. “There’s a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute bands out there, but none of them holds it as dear to their hearts as the guys who have been there as long as we have. We have the history; I played on the first [recording] sessions. We just know that we have to portray the music with the integrity and the sound and the love as close as we can to when it was originally created. It’s only right.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s road to superstardom began in 1964, inside a small cabin at the end of a field in Jacksonville, Florida. They called it Hell House, which gives you a general idea of the accommodations – or lack thereof – afforded by the intense Florida heat. Nevertheless, in its confines, they spent years writing and rehearsing the songs that would be featured on their classic 1973 debut album, (Pronounced ’Lĕh-’nérd ’Skin-’nérd), and establish them as an iconic southern rock band.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the album’s release, and in this lesson, we’ll celebrate its enduring popularity and appeal by mining the musical gold found within each of its tracks, including the classic that would be a highlight of the band’s concerts for decades to come: “Free Bird.”

Throughout its nearly 42 minutes, Pronounced is spearheaded by the electrifying guitar work of Gary Rossington and Allen Collins. In fact, the band had a third guitarist: Ed King, formerly of Strawberry Alarm Clock, who had joined to replace bassist Leon Wilkeson shortly before recording began. (Wilkeson rejoined after the album was completed, and King moved to full-time guitar duties.) Even so, King contributes guitar to two songs – “Tuesday’s Gone” and “Mississippi Kid” – on which producer Al Kooper handles bass duties.

While the band’s performances all sound as if they teem with an excitement born from spontaneity, all the guitar parts were actually crafted with great thought and care, with nothing put to tape that didn’t pass muster with the band. What resulted was a record that sounds as if a bunch of longtime friends were just jamming – albeit with ready-made classic guitar parts. And as we’ll soon discover, much of the band’s sound springs from the savvy interplay between its guitarists. Let’s have a closer look at the album’s eight tracks.

Pronounced kicks off with “I Ain’t the One,” and its intro is classic Skynyrd – a funky, bluesy guitar riff provided by Rossington on his Gibson Les Paul, complemented by Collins wielding his Gibson Firebird to provide some trademark lead work.

What’s remarkable about Collins’ playing is that he’s able to eschew the common pattern- and lick-based approach to blues-rock playing in favor of a more melodic take, allowing him to create soulful lines.

Ex. 1 is inspired by both guitarists’ playing on this song, which is in the key of A major. They create their uniquely southern sound mainly by drawing from the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G), most commonly heard in blues and rock, while deftly borrowing the major 3rd, C #, from the major pentatonic scale (A, B, C #, E, F #), which lends a brighter country flavor.

In addition to their talents for writing catchy rock riffs and songs, Skynyrd could compose ballads like nobody’s business, each stirring in its own way. Our introduction to this facet of their songwriting comes with Pronounced’s second track, “Tuesday’s Gone,” which features Rossington’s thoughtful lead work.

The guitarist uses repetitive bends that evoke the sound of a slide guitar (he plays some real slide guitar later in the album).

Ex. 2 is influenced by his lyrical playing here. Note that King quietly makes his first appearance on guitar on this track, adding subtle fills during Billy Powell’s piano solo.

Collins’ rhythm guitar part in the chorus of “Gimme Three Steps,” one of the album’s singles, is a lesson in how to transform basic elements of rock guitar into fresh-sounding hooks.

Here he does so by employing some simple, yet ear-catching rhythms. His part loosely mimics the rhythm of vocalist Ronnie Van Zant’s melody, with each supporting the other.

Ex. 3 is inspired by this very effective guitar part.

In the song’s guitar solo, Collins continues a variation of the same rhythm part, with Rossington adding some nasty lead lines featuring the interval of a perfect 4th (two and one-half steps). The hollow-sounding nature of this interval lends itself to creating harmonized melodic lines in which each note speaks fully, even when played with a distorted tone, as there is little interference among the prominent harmonics involved.

Rossington’s repetition of the three dyads at 2:20 can be seen to slyly evoke the “three steps towards the door” for which Van Zant is pleading, so as to avoid a nasty bar fight.

Ex. 4 brings this catchy phrase to mind.

Next up is another ballad, “Simple Man,” which introduced a hallmark of the Skynyrd sound, whereby Rossington and Collins interject searing riffs and powerful lead lines into what begins as a seemingly subdued affair.

Ex. 5 is inspired by the low-end riff that thunders in at the 1:04 mark and foreshadows more storm clouds ahead. On the recording, all the guitars are tuned down one half step (low to high: Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, Bb, Eb), which adds to the track’s brooding quality, but Ex. 5 is played in standard tuning.

If we were listening to the record on vinyl, this is where we’d flip it over to side two. “Things Goin’ On” reminds us once again that Skynyrd’s twin-guitar assault is unlike the usual fare.

In two-guitar bands, when both guitarists play simultaneously, their parts are usually doubled or arranged in different musical registers, or pitch ranges – one playing low and the other high – in order to clearly distinguish the two parts.

Throughout “Things Goin’ On,” however, Rossington and Collins defy convention by playing different parts in the same register. They deftly pull this off by creating two completely independent lines that, while close together in pitch, never step on each other. This produces an ear-catching effect, as upon first listen it can be difficult to tell who’s playing what.

Ex. 6 is inspired by the song’s intro. Note again how using interesting rhythms can bring bluesy riffs new life.

The next track, “Mississippi Kid,” demonstrates how Skynyrd were capable of delivering the unexpected. The bluegrass-based song takes a stylistic departure from Pronounced’s previous songs but fits right in.

King makes his second and final guitar appearance here, contributing a nifty acoustic slide guitar solo. But it’s Collins, accompanied by Kooper on mandolin, who lays the song’s foundation, juxtaposing some fine flatpicking with sliding chordal strums.

Ex. 7 is influenced by his playing throughout.

How does one take a simple G7 chord and make it rock with bluesy funkiness? Rossington and Collins answer this question in “Poison Whiskey” by deconstructing the chord into two separate parts.

In the intro, Rossington subtly implies G7 with a rock-solid low single-note riff. Basing the line primarily on the G minor pentatonic scale (G, Bb, C, D, F), the guitarist again borrows the major 3rd (B) from its parallel major pentatonic counterpart (G, A, B, D, E).

Collins, in turn, takes the top half of the chords, alternating between two dyads implying G7 and C5/G.

Notice how he omits the root of G7 and simply plays the 3rd (B) and b7th (F). These two notes, the interval of a tritone (three whole steps), clearly define the sound of a dominant 7th chord, even in the absence of its root.

Why leave it out here? Well, Rossington’s got it covered! Plus, by omitting it, Collins prevents the two parts from covering similar ground.

Ex. 8 is reminiscent of the duo’s playing here. Next time you’re faced with a dominant 7th chord, try taking a similar tack by leaving out its root, even if you’re the sole guitarist.

When Ronnie Van Zandt asks, “What song is it you wanna hear?” on Skynyrd’s 1976 live album, One More From the Road, the crowd responds with a resounding cry of “‘Free Bird’!” To their delight, the band obliges by offering up a searing 14-minute rendition of the song. Clocking in at well over nine minutes on Pronounced, “Free Bird” firmly established Skynyrd’s place in southern rock royalty from the get-go.

In the 1970s and beyond, being able to play Collins’ epic outro solo became a rite of passage for generations of aspiring rock guitarists. Before examining it, however, let’s take a closer look at the song’s gentler intro.

The song, Pronounced’s final track, begins as a ballad, in which Van Zant tells the story of a man who feels compelled to leave a loving relationship to search for himself in far-off places. Powell’s plaintive organ is first to enter. When the band follows suit, we find Collins playing clean, arpeggiated chords on his Gibson Firebird, while Rossington plays the song’s signature slide guitar melody using a glass slide and his Gibson SG.

Ex. 9 is inspired by Rossington’s instrumental expression of intense longing and regret.

The song and album end with Collins’ five-minute outro guitar solo, played over a repeating three-chord progression at a brisk tempo.

The solo offers a veritable clinic in using repeated motifs to build melodic tension and create a series of escalating musical climaxes.

Based almost entirely on the G minor pentatonic scale (with a bit of G major pentatonic thrown in), the solo never fully resolves. Instead, it fades out with the guitarist continuing to spit fire, as we’re left to imagine what was left on the cutting room floor.

Ex. 10 is reminiscent of Collins’ rhythmic approach to creating this southern blues-rock lead guitar tour de force.

It begins with a lick based on notes of mostly longer value – half notes, quarter notes and eighths. The intensity is then ratcheted up by the introduction of 16th notes, finally reaching its peak in a whirlwind of 16th-note triplets. Focusing more on the rhythms you’re playing than on the actual notes is a potent way to create memorable and dramatic solos.

The rhythms you choose will almost always imply certain notes, while the opposite is often not the case.

“Free Bird” expresses a different sort of vulnerability than Pronounced’s previous ballads, again showing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s remarkable range even at this early stage of their career. Its sorrow also now seems prescient, as tragedy would interrupt the band’s runaway success in the form of a 1977 plane crash, which took the lives of Van Zant as well as members of the touring band.

Rossington and Collins were severely injured, but recovered, although Collins was left paralyzed by a car accident in 1986.

Despite all of this, Skynyrd ultimately relaunched in 1987, sadly without Collins, but with Johnny Van Zant now taking over vocal duties for his late brother Ronnie.

Rossington was onboard up until his death on March 5, 2023, at the age of 71.

Lynyrd Skynyrd were deservedly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and the group’s long-running appeal cemented them as one of the most enduring bands of the past half-century. And without a doubt, (Pronounced ’Lĕh-’nérd ’Skin-’nérd) had a lot to do with that.

Growing up in classic rock’s golden years shouldn’t negate the possibility that you enjoy music made today. I may have an extensive vinyl collection of favorites dating back to my childhood, but I stream music everyday and constantly discover great songs by inspiring artists across the genres.

Yet, there are some who believe the modern music scene is a wasteland.

If you think that, you probably aren’t listening. But if one thing has suffered in the past two decades, it is the long-player. There are fewer epic albums being made today, and there is less reason to invest one’s time and ears in 40 minutes or more of an artist’s music.

Of course, I say this with the benefit – and certainly blessing – of having grown up at a time when the album was king.

Take 1973. A half century ago, we experienced one of the greatest years in rock and roll. It was a year that saw debuts from potent acts like Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, as well as from guitar heroes like Tony Rice and Lindsey Buckingham, making his nod with Buckingham Nicks.

From my youthful vantage point, 1973 was lived as 52 weeks of breathless Saturday trips to the record store, where we were tempted by such epic albums as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Who’s Quadrophenia, not to mention prog monsters like Yes’s live three-album set Yessongs, Manfred Mann Earth Band’s Solar Fire, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard/A True Star, Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery and, the behemoth of them all, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

In 1973, we saw the last flashes of glam rock with Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups, Rick Derringer’s All American Boy, Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and the debut from the New York Dolls.

But it was a great year for art rock, with Fripp and Eno’s experimental tour de force (No Pussyfooting), John Cale’s orchestral pop masterpiece Paris 1919, Lou Reed’s dramatic Berlin, Camel’s brilliant self-titled debut, and a pair of landmark Roxy Music albums: For Your Pleasure and Stranded.

That was all but the tip of that year’s multi-genre, stylistically freewheeling musical iceberg.

For any album to stand out among this pack, it would have to be pretty freaking great. Which is the least you can say about Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, a compilation of eight wildly inventive songs that together serve as a cross-section of that year’s dizzying musical styles, including prog, reggae, glam, folk, funk and art-rock.

It was the first Zeppelin album I bought and the first – perhaps only – album they made that kept their bombast in check, served up an ear-catching range of styles and delivered with economical arrangements.

As Jimmy Page said: “You can hear the fun we were having.”

Indeed, we can, to this day. Here’s to singing in the sunshine and laughing in the rain.

It’s virtually impossible to pare decades of rock and roll down to a top-ten list. There are, however, some guitar solos every player needs to know about.

Here are some of the greatest ever committed to record...

10. "Statesboro Blues" by The Allman Brothers Band from 'At Fillmore East' (1971)

Guitarist: Duane Allman

Although the end of "Layla" may be more memorable to most folks, Allman’s Statesboro slide show verifies his title as the undisputed king of bottleneck guitar. 

Slick as oil but with the ability to stop on a dime, Allman not only redefined how slide guitar was played but also created a recycling market for empty Coricidin bottles.

9. "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses from 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)

Guitarist: Slash

While Axl swayed and sashayed like Steve Wonder around his mic stand, Slash laid back with his Les Paul, patiently waiting for his turn in the spotlight. 

Then, with his blistering ascent up the E harmonic minor scale – which kicks the second solo of this tune into high gear – the top-hatted genius single-handedly breathed new life into wah-pedal sales.

8. "Crossroads" by Cream from 'Wheels of Fire' (1968)

Guitarist: Eric Clapton

Slowhand? Not on this track. Clapton pulls out every blues-rock move in his lick-tionary for this roadhouse romper. 

The true voodoo of this solo lies at the crossroads where major and minor pentatonic tonalities meet, mingle and blast off from E.C.’s fretboard. 

Ol’ Scratch surely smiled when he heard this one.

7. "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne from 'Blizzard of Ozz' (1980)

Guitarist: Randy Rhoads

You almost wonder if Ozzy named this tune after hearing Rhoads’ white-knuckled rock and roll ride up and down the F# minor scale. 

What more could you want in a metal guitar solo? Tapping, rakes, bends, trills ascending legato runs... 

Rhoads set Eighties guitarists on the rails of neoclassical rock with this one. All aboard!

6. "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin from 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)

Guitarist: Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page's "Stairway” solo is nothing short of divine. 

His resolution to the natural F note in the opening minor pentatonic lick of the solo couldn’t have been more perfect if the Almighty himself had chosen the note.

5. "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits from 'Dire Straits' (1978)

Guitarist: Mark Knopfler

Sultan says, “Spend less time making your harem moan and more time making your guitar cry and sing!” 

For those of you who’ve learned the outro solo the lazy way – playing eighth-note triplets for the daunting Dm, Bb and C arpeggios – get your fingers back to the wood shed. 

Those are 16th notes that the “Sultan of Strat” rips off.

4. "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd from 'Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd' (1973) 

Guitarist: Gary Rossington and Allen Collins

To paraphrase Adrian Belew in King Crimson’s "Indiscipline," "I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks…” 

This could go on forever – kinda like the outro solo to "Free Bird," in which guitarists Rossington and Collins double each other for most of this pull-off parade. 

It’s impressive not because of the degree of difficulty of the licks but because of the sheer volume they need to recall – 27, including variations!

3. "Eruption" by Van Halen from 'Van Halen' (1978) 

The Holy Grail for all aspiring rock guitarists. Learn Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and you’ve earned some serious bragging rights. 

But if you really want props, you’ve got to tame the whole volcano, not just the tremolo picking and tapping sections.

2. "All Along the Watchtower" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 'Electric Ladyland' (1968)

Jimi Hendrix offers plenty of reason to get excited in his "Watchtower" solo. 

Besides his masterful manipulation of the C# minor pentatonic scale, Hendrix’s wah-drenched octave climb and the double-stops in the latter half bear out his gift for melodic embellishment. 

It’s enough to make any cat growl.

1. "Little Wing" by Stevie Ray Vaughan from 'The Sky Is Crying' (1991)

With little bits of Jimi, Wes and Mayfield, and a whole lotta soul, SRV exhibits exceptional dynamic prowess throughout, making this reverent Hendrix cover his own. 

A seemingly lost art among modern-day guitarists, Vaughan’s R&B-style chord melody is like priceless art. It should be both admired and studied.

Gary Rossington, guitarist for Southern rock icons Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died at the age of 71, the band confirmed in a statement Sunday (March 5). No cause of death was given. 

"It is with our deepest sympathy and sadness that we have to advise, that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter and guitarist, Gary Rossington, today," the band wrote on Facebook.

"Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie, and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family’s privacy at this difficult time." 

At the time of his death, Rossington was the band's last surviving original member.  

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Rossington first formed the band that would become Lynyrd Skynyrd in the mid-1960s with guitarist Allen Collins, drummer Bob Burns, and vocalist Ronnie Van Zant. The nascent group were informed by a love of British blues-rock, especially as the decade went on.

"We loved Cream and [Eric] Clapton’s style, and all the guitar players with the British bands – Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and also Hendrix," Rossington told Guitar World in a 2015 interview. "But mostly it was Clapton because he was so good and he played more of the kind of blues we were raised on. I grew up listening to him and hoping to be that good one day."

After years of gigging and building a strong local following in northern Florida and around the South, the band – now called Lynyrd Skynyrd – came to the attention of MCA, which issued the band's debut album, (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd), in 1973.

The album contained the seminal closer, "Free Bird," an extended opus featuring a frenzied, multi-tracked outro solo from Collins and Rossington's lyrical slide guitar work. The track brought the band to a national audience, and would go on to become one of the most iconic rock songs of all time. 

Skynyrd's sophomore effort, 1974's Second Helping, featured an even bigger hit, "Sweet Home Alabama." Built upon a funky, Rossington-penned riff, the spunky response to Neil Young's "Southern Man" became a bone fide anthem, and the band's first Top 10 hit.

The band's stature continued to grow throughout the mid-'70s, but, on October 20, 1977, their career came tragically to a halt when their private plane crashed in Mississippi. Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backup vocalist Cassie Gaines were killed, and Skynyrd subsequently dissolved.

Rossington later re-grouped with Collins, and multiple other Skynyrd alumni, to form the Rossington Collins Band, who – while never reaching the commercial heights of Skynyrd – found moderate success with songs like "Don't Misunderstand Me."

Rossington would later anchor Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1987 reunion, with Johnny Van Zant taking his older brother Ronnie's place on vocals.

By 2018 – after the death of the band's original third guitarist, Ed King – Rossington was Lynyrd Skynyrd's last surviving original member. He struggled with health issues in the final years of his life, undergoing quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, and suffering a heart attack in 2015.

Rossington also missed a number of tour dates with the band after undergoing emergency heart surgery in 2021.

News of Rossington's death prompted an outpouring of tributes from his fellow guitar heroes. You can read some of those below.

Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul is a deep dive into the time before and after 1973’s Brothers and Sisters.

It was not only the band’s best-selling album, at over seven million copies sold, but it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

Celebrating the album’s 50th anniversary, Brothers and Sisters the book delves into the making of the album, while also presenting a broader cultural history of the era, based on first-person interviews, historical documents and deep research and a trove of never-before-heard interviews conducted by the band’s “Tour Mystic,” Kirk West.

The five-year period between Duane Allman’s 1971 death and the Allman Brothers Band’s 1976 breakup was a remarkable run for the group that helped define the era, rock history and American culture and politics.

They played a major role in electing President Jimmy Carter; were intimately linked with the Grateful Dead; and inspired the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the entire Southern Rock genre.

Gregg Allman’s marriage to the iconic star Cher also put the couple at the vanguard of a newly emerging celebrity media culture.

A wide range of fascinating, crucial characters pass through the pages of Brothers and Sisters. Not only Jimmy Carter and Cher, but Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, actress Susan Sarandon and Native American activists.

The book includes several extensive chapters on the Jam at Watkins Glen, the concert featuring the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band that drew over 600,000 people to a small town in upstate New York and will celebrate its 50th anniversary the week of the book’s July 2023 release.

Brothers and Sisters includes the deepest reporting and writing yet about the bond between the Allmans and the Dead and just what drove them apart.

There are also chapters about the making of Gregg Allman’s Laid Back and Dickey Betts’ Highway Call, solo debuts that have been largely overlooked.

The book also contains the complete inside story behind Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, which was largely based on his experiences touring with the Allman Brothers Band for a 1973 Rolling Stone cover story.

Brothers and Sisters is enlivened by content from Kirk West’s never-heard interviews.

“Kirk was researching a book while the band was broken up in 1986 and 1987 and he interviewed all the surviving members extensively: Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks, as well as many other friends and associates,” says Paul.

“The subjects were talking to someone they deeply trusted, the band was twice broken up with no plans to reunite and everyone was bracingly honest and deeply reflective and insightful.

“The interviews were an absolute gold mine, most of which not even Kirk had ever listened to. I am thrilled to get them out to fans of the band. I can’t wait to share this book and start talking about it!”

Pre-order Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul (St. Martin’s Press; July 25, 2023) here.

"All I want for Christmas is a rock ‘n’ roll electric guitar," sings Chuck Berry (1926-2017) – a sentiment shared by many a guitarist since the father of rock ‘n’ roll released his recording of “Run Rudolph Run” in 1958.

A Gibson devotee, Berry became synonymous with the company’s thinline semi-hollowbody electric guitars launched that year. Already known for playing an ES-350T thinline hollowbody electric, Berry was an early adopter of the ES-335, -345 and -355 instruments and continues to help popularize these iconic guitars to this day.

Indeed, earlier this year Gibson introduced the Chuck Berry 1970s ES-355 to their ES (Electric Spanish) line alongside the Chuck Berry 1955 ES-350T.

Berry’s cut of "Run Rudolph Run" made it well into the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1958. It eventually became a top ten-selling single earlier this year – several decades following its original release.

Over time, “Run Rudolph Run” has established itself as a firm seasonal favorite, with countless artists having recorded their own version of this generations-old rock ‘n’ roll Christmas classic.

We’ve compiled a playlist of ten of our favorites. Everyone has theirs, so in no particular order…

Brian Setzer

Lemmy, Billy F. Gibbons and Dave Grohl

Keith Richards

L.A. Guns

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Grateful Dead

Foo Fighters

Cheap Trick

Sheryl Crow

Dwight Yoakam

We hope you enjoyed listening. Stay tuned for more over the Christmas period, and from all of us at Guitar Player - happy holidays!

Released in 1971 on Capricorn Records, At Fillmore East captures the Allman Brothers – guitarists Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, keyboardist/singer Gregg Allman, bassist Berry Oakley, and drummers Jaimoe and Butch Trucks – in the zone and at the peak of their powers.

All one can hope for when buying a live record is to hear the self-conscious studio restraints vanish and the intangible elements of spirit and heart make their way to tape for the ages. At Fillmore East delivers in spades.

“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” exemplifies the Allman Brothers’ magic. This Dickey Betts-penned composition ebbs, flows, peaks and simmers, while the entire group melds into a musical army.

This track is a mystical journey that never leaves the high altitude of stellar. It starts seductively with the iconic Am9 - Am, Am9 - D changes, and with volume swells and cinematic unison harmonies that preface a boulder rolling down a hill. Dickey and Duane play great solos, and the band churns in support.

Other tracks, like “Statesboro Blues,” still hold up 50 years after the fact as quintessential blues-rock tracks. Duane’s Les Paul through a Marshall sounds like a flamethrower, while he exhibits a slide technique so exceptional, it’s still the high bar for guitarists to aspire to.

Absolutely no one before Duane sounded like him, and his contributions to the Allman Brothers and Derek & the Dominos’ Layla sessions – not to mention his contributions to Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann and Wilson Pickett – are part of the significant legacy this young man left us before his untimely death at 24.

While the group is informed by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, Blind Willie Johnson and the like, they take the next step of redefining the blues guitar as they hear and feel it. The listener gets to hear them innovate the genre.

“Done Somebody Wrong” features a great Gregg Allman vocal, to which Duane answers by making the guitar seem like another human voice, while Dickey digs in, never to be upstaged or diminished.

Speaking of which, Mr. Betts has a style we could all learn from. He plants himself with a pentatonic idea so thoroughly, he torturously depletes its every possibility before ascending to the next chapter.

His solos are like a slow walk up a dark stairway in a movie thriller.

Dickey’s artistry blossomed on the post-Duane LP Brothers and Sisters, and his original gem “Jessica” shows him at the top of his game. Together, Duane and Dickey are the quintessential guitar duo, and they pioneered and defined the timeless marriage of harmony guitars.

It’s safe to say At Fillmore East influenced and opened the door for Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvin Bishop, Dixie Dregs and other influential southern rock groups that followed. 

The Allman Brothers’ influence was so distilled and true, most of those groups couldn’t help but retain the language and spirit of the southern rock genre the Allmans helped create.

Pick up a copy of At Fillmore East here.

Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington recently underwent successful emergency heart surgery, the band reported on social media.

As a result, Rossington missed the band's July 22 performance at the Twin Cities Summer Jam in Shakopee, Minnesota and their July 23 performance at the North Dakota State Fair. His place was filled by Black Star Riders/Thin Lizzy/Alice Cooper/Brother Cane guitar veteran Damon Johnson, who will continue to perform with the group during their next leg of shows while Rossington recovers. 

“Our thoughts and prayers are with Gary Rossington as he recovers from emergency heart surgery," read a post on Lynyrd Skynyrd's Instagram page. "Gary is home resting and recovering with his family. He wants everyone to know he is doing good and expects a full recovery.

“After this past year, the country being shut down and everything we have all been thru, The Rossingtons encouraged the band to go perform in his absence. Music is a powerful healer! We all felt playing the shows and bringing the music to y’all was a better option than cancelling the performances.

“We wish Gary a speedy recovery and we will see the Skynyrd Nation very soon!”

Rossington, 69, is the only remaining original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and indeed the only surviving member of the group's "Free Bird"/"Sweet Home Alabama"-era lineups. He previously suffered a heart attack in October 2015, forcing the band to cancel the final two American dates of their 2015 tour. 

“Gary Rossington’s guitar playing consumed me from day one of discovering Skynyrd’s music in my youth," Johnson said. “It was an honor to lend a hand to the band this weekend, and my family is sending buckets of healing energy [in] Gary's direction. Thank you, Skynyrd Nation.”

Though Skynyrd's 2018-2019 Last of the Street Survivors tour was billed as their farewell, the band have 10 remaining American tour dates in August and September.

To view the group's itinerary, stop by lynyrdskynrd.com.

In a couple of weeks' time, Guernsey’s will begin a huge two-day auction featuring hundreds of items, including instruments owned and played by some of rock ‘n’ roll's greatest guitarists. The New York firm will be hosting their "A Century of Music" online auction between July 14 and 15, which also features rare memorabilia from the 1969 Woodstock festival. 

Highlights from this incredible display include the “Jimi Hendrix Electric Lady Control Room Monitors” and a host of iconic guitars such as Lynyrd Skynyrd's Allen Collins' 1964 Gibson Firebird III; one of Eddie Van Halen’s Kramer Stryper guitars; Bo Diddley’s 1957 Gretsch Jet Fire Bird; Eric Clapton's 1999 Gibson ’59 reissue Les Paul Standard; and a 1970 Gibson SG used by Paul McCartney. 

Here are just a few of the incredible guitars currently on display...

Eddie Van Halen’s Kramer Stryper

Used by Eddie on Van Halen's 1984 world tour and 1986 "5150" tour this iconic ‘superstrat’ is one of five Strypers built by the late, great man himself at the Kramer factory in New Jersey.

Allen Collins' 1964 Gibson Firebird III

This 1964 Firebird III was modified with a P-90 in the bridge position and became the ”Free Bird Firebird” on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s mid-Seventies "Torture Tour" 

1970 Gibson SG used by Paul McCartney

This original Gibson SG dates to 1970 and was used by The Beatles legend to record with at London’s Air Studios in 2012.

Take a look this amazing collection here (before it disappears from sight again!)

When Ed King passed away in August 2018, the Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist left more than classic songs like “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Saturday Night Special” as his legacy. “Ed had a beautiful collection of instruments,” Isbell says. “He didn’t just get good vintage guitars - he got the best versions of pretty much everything.”

Over the holidays that year, Christie Carter of Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville called Isbell to see if he would play some of the late guitar-slinger’s collection for the shop’s YouTube channel. Isbell worked his way through the ’73 Strat that King used on “Sweet Home Alabama” and a parcel of gold-top Les Pauls before spying the 1959 Les Paul nicknamed Red Eye on a stand. 

Isbell wasn’t sure it was the real one. King and Gibson had collaborated on a Collector’s Choice edition, and he had multiple versions. But Carter confirmed it was indeed the real deal, which was famously stolen from King at gunpoint in 1987 and remained at large until he recovered it a decade later.

“I never thought I would need a ’Burst,” Isbell says. “I mean, nobody needs a ’Burst, but I never thought that I would want one, as expensive as they are. I’ve got a ’61 [Gibson ES-] 335 that’s just incredible, and I’ve never heard a Les Paul that could beat it.”

By his own account, this one did. “I couldn’t think about anything else,” he says. “I got lost on the way home from the store. I bought a bottle of water, and when I got home, I still hadn’t opened it. I couldn’t sleep that night.”

Isbell asked his manager to find a way for him to afford it without taking gigs away from his band or pulling him away from home for too long. He played a lot of gigs he normally wouldn’t take, from birthday parties to other private engagements. “I met some interesting people and went to some parts of the Hamptons that I’ve not been to before,” he says.

Although he’s made a few changes to preserve the original hardware, including replacing the tuners and tailpiece with retrofits, the guitar is largely intact from the moment it was made. He thinks the pickup covers may be New Old Stock, and it’s rumored King had a partial refret up to the 12th fret, but the pickups and wiring harness are from February 1959.

Isbell started 2019 with Red Eye in his hands and jokes that producer Dave Cobb called him to play so often last year, he figured he was hiring the guitar more than him. “I knew it was going to be a big guitar year.”