On 21 January 1882 a speed skater invented a jump. The Norwegian who launched himself off a forward edge at a special figures competition in Vienna, still wearing his long racing blades, turned one and a half times in the air and came down backwards on the other foot, the steel gouging a white scar across the ice where he landed, was Axel Paulsen. Every competitive skater since has had to learn it.
A jump enters the rule book under the name of the first person to land it, and after that it belongs to everybody who can stand the falls. The greatest heavy metal guitarists are measured the same way: not by speed or reader polls, but by the move each of them landed first and that every player since has been obliged to learn, usually the hard way, with the skin of the fingertips as the fee.
What the bands of heavy metal built as groups is argued band by band. A guitarist is judged on his hands alone, and each name here earns its place with one change the instrument never gave back.
The greatest heavy metal guitarists who wrote the rule book
The Birmingham guitarist who stopped building songs out of a verse and a chorus and built them instead out of a chain of riffs, each one knocked through into the next like a wall taken out between two rooms, was Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath. "Wheels of Confusion", which opens Vol. 4, released by Vertigo in September 1972, runs eight minutes and fourteen seconds through a string of separate riffs before Geezer Butler's bass carries it out on an instrumental coda the American pressings title "The Straightener". The solo is almost an afterthought. The riff is the architecture.
The player who turned the guitar solo into a composed movement with a beginning and an argument, and then handed half of the argument to a keyboard player to answer, was Ritchie Blackmore. "A Light in the Black", the closing track of Rainbow's Rising, released by Oyster in May 1976, gives Tony Carey's synthesiser and Blackmore's Stratocaster a long instrumental section in which each takes a phrase off the other and throws it back faster. Two decades of power metal duels between guitar and keyboard descend from those eight minutes. That is not in doubt.
The German who taught the lead guitar to carry a tune a listener could whistle back, with a vibrato slow and wide enough to belong to a singer, was Michael Schenker. "Into the Arena", the instrumental on the first Michael Schenker Group album, issued by Chrysalis in August 1980 with Roger Glover producing, has no singer and does not need one, because the melody is already sung by the guitar, Schenker's wah pedal parked half open through the whole record as a tone filter rather than rocked for effect. A thousand solos since were written to be hummed.
The solo is almost an afterthought. The riff is the architecture.
Two guitarists and one solo
In a cricket partnership two batsmen stand at opposite ends of the pitch, and every run they take sends them sprinting past each other with bats scraping into the crease, so that the man who faced the last ball is rarely the man facing the next. The fast bowler who has finally worked one of them out hurls a hard leather ball at a different grip, a different stance and a different eye.
The Midlands pair who ran the lead guitar on those terms for more than three decades were Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing of Judas Priest, Downing the wilder of the two, all whammy bar dives and runs that sound as though they might not come back, Tipton the more composed, building his solos phrase by phrase like a second song. Neither was a rhythm guitarist. Both were soloists.
"Freewheel Burning", which opens Defenders of the Faith, released by Columbia in January 1984, shows the method at full speed: the solo section passes from one guitarist to the other and back over a double kick drum barrage, the handover audible in the attack before it is audible in the notes. Every metal band with two soloists has lived by that trade since.
Iron Maiden split its lead the same way from 1981, and the pair whose solos can be told apart with the eyes shut are Dave Murray and Adrian Smith. Murray's runs pour out in legato slurs, hammered on and pulled off with barely a pick stroke among them, while Smith's are built note by note into a second melody, as on the solo he wrote and played for "Stranger in a Strange Land" from Somewhere in Time in 1986. Apart, they are two temperaments on one stage.
The conservatory, the tapping hand and the stopwatch
The guitarist who proved one man could be the rhythm section and the soloist at once, writing solos in advance and then playing them note for note night after night as though they were part of the song rather than a break from it, was Randy Rhoads, the first guitarist in Ozzy Osbourne's solo band.
"Flying High Again", from Diary of a Madman, released by Jet in November 1981, closes its solo on a tapped descending passage built from triads that follow the chords underneath. Tapping was already fashionable, and Van Halen's own two-handed style had every guitar magazine chasing it. Rhoads used it sparingly, inside a written solo, and moved on.
Rhoads died in a light aircraft crash in Leesburg, Florida, on 19 March 1982. He was 25.
The technique Rhoads borrowed for that passage came from Eddie Van Halen, whose two-handed tapping went through every practice room of the early eighties, and he stands on the boundary rather than inside it. Van Halen was a hard rock band with a heavy guitarist, and the heavy metal that followed took the technique and left the band where it was.
The Swede who took Blackmore's classical scales and fired them at a velocity nobody had yet asked of a Stratocaster, arpeggios going up the neck in bursts like tracer rounds with every fifth one lit so the eye can follow the line, answered to the name Yngwie Malmsteen, and what he changed was the stopwatch. After him, speed was something a guitarist could be measured against.
"Far Beyond the Sun", the instrumental at the centre of Rising Force, released by Polydor in 1984, is the exhibit: a theme stated, then broken into sweeps and pedal-note runs, then stated again, the whole thing played on the fretboard Malmsteen had been scalloping out with sandpaper since his teens in Stockholm, so the fingers press the string and never the wood. Imitators followed in a salvo that filled the guitar magazines for a decade, few of them with the tune.
Vibrato, the squeal and the heavy end
The English guitarist who dragged the twin guitars of Thin Lizzy into heavy metal for their last studio album, with a vibrato as wide as a singer's and a Les Paul driven until it snarled, was John Sykes. "Cold Sweat", which he wrote with Phil Lynott for Thunder and Lightning, released by Vertigo in March 1983, is the heaviest thing the band ever put out, the riff ripping through the old boogie like a wire brush through rust. The band broke up that year. The tone went on to Whitesnake with him.
The New Jersey guitarist who turned the pinch harmonic, a note struck so the edge of the thumb catches the string and it squeals an octave or two above itself, from a happy accident into a signature, was Zakk Wylde, who joined Ozzy Osbourne for No Rest for the Wicked in 1988 and formed Black Label Society a decade later, in 1998. On any honest reading he is the last exponent in the line, the player who kept the heavy metal solo alive through the nineties.
| Guitarist | Band | What he landed first | Hear it on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tony Iommi | Black Sabbath | The song built from a chain of riffs | "Wheels of Confusion" (1972) |
| Ritchie Blackmore | Rainbow | The composed solo, traded with a keyboard | "A Light in the Black" (1976) |
| Michael Schenker | Michael Schenker Group | The lead as a melody to hum | "Into the Arena" (1980) |
| Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing | Judas Priest | Two soloists of equal rank, trading | "Freewheel Burning" (1984) |
| Dave Murray and Adrian Smith | Iron Maiden | Two opposite temperaments on one stage | "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1986) |
| Randy Rhoads | Ozzy Osbourne | The written solo, played the same every night | "Flying High Again" (1981) |
| Yngwie Malmsteen | Solo | Speed as a measurable standard | "Far Beyond the Sun" (1984) |
| John Sykes | Thin Lizzy | The singer's vibrato on a metal tone | "Cold Sweat" (1983) |
| Zakk Wylde | Ozzy Osbourne, Black Label Society | The pinch harmonic as a signature | No Rest for the Wicked (1988) |
None of these players is the fastest alive. That was never the test. The vanguard of any instrument is the handful of players whose one idea became everybody's homework, and in heavy metal the homework has barely changed since 1984.
The guitar is one road into the canon and the microphone is another, with its own roll of honour and its own gaps, and one of the least told parts of that second roll belongs to the heavy metal bands with black singers. Nobody there needed a guitarist to get in.
