Watch Shawn Lane Melt the Fretboard with an Incredible Solo at a Memphis Club in 1992
“There was no one alive who sounded like him and he just kept going up,” Jimmy Herring once said of Lane.
Since his tragic death from lung failure in 2003, at just 40 years old, Shawn Lane has become almost a mythical figure in the guitar community.
Though his recorded output – two solo albums, three instructional videos, a DVD with Jonas Hellborg, and over 20 total appearances on other records – attracted little commercial notice during his lifetime, videos displaying his scarcely believable technical skill have won him a steadily growing legion of admirers in the internet age.
One such video is the one above, showing Lane cutting loose with an unbelievable three-minute solo during a performance at The South End in Memphis in 1992.
Lane was a deeply soulful player, with an incredible range of influences that all bled into his playing, but his sheer speed in this video is something to behold. It's no wonder that Paul Gilbert once described him as “the most terrifying guy of all time.”
Sit back and enjoy.
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Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com and GuitarPlayer.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.
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