Illinois Entertainer

Perpetually under siege by synthesizers, jealous bandmates, “Guitar Hero,” and its own practitioners, it’s almost as if the guitar can’t exist without more tension than what’s going on between the neck and the bridge. So at IE we figured why not spray some gasoline on the fire and, for our annual Guitar Month, debate who Chicago’s greats have been. “You mean like Terry Kath and Peter Cetera?” Kath = yes. Cetera’s just the man who’ll fight for our honor.

• Read more: Cover Story: The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

Joe Satriani
Surfing With The Web Surfers

Valentine’s Day was four days ago, but guitar instrumentalist Joe Satriani is just now writing his dearest a love note. He begins reciting it by phone from his small, professional recording studio on the ground floor of his San Francisco home. “Record Store Day,” he reads aloud, “April 19th, 2008.” The virtuoso is breaking out the sweet stuff for the one he credits with selling 10 million of his studio albums through his 22 years as a solo recording artist: the record-store industry, now hobbled by illegal file sharing and an iTunes-designed singles market.

• Read more: Joe Satriani interview

The Black Keys
Brian’s Song

Spikes in Black Keys activity are nearly imperceptible, akin to testing for jumps in a hummingbird’s fluttering heart rate. They are there, however.

Appearing: Saturday April 12th at Riviera Theatre in Chicago.

• Read more: The Black Keys interview

Black Tide
Age Old Question

Alex Nunez definitely remembers his first impression of Zakk Sandler. “He was a dick to everybody,” Nunez recalls.

Appearing: Sunday August 10th at First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park.

• Read more: Black Tide interview

Putting It Down And Pleking It Up
The Plek Machine Comes To Chicagoland

George MacPhail is accustomed to leaving work at the end of the day with hands that hurt. Actually, he is accustomed to leaving work with hands, fingers, and arms that hurt. MacPhail is one of two guitar technicians at The Music Gallery guitar shop in Highland Park, where he has worked since 1975 and, if you believe what they say about the man nicknamed “The Doctor,” has repaired or adjusted more than 20,000 instruments in those 33 years.

• Read more: The New Guitar Plek-trum

Hayes Carll
No Longer A Mess In Texas

Hayes Carll has just released his third album, Trouble In Mind. His first, Flowers And Liquor, for Compadre Records, was produced by Lisa Morales of Sisters Morales. His second, Little Rock, released independently, was produced by R. S. Field. One of its songs, “Down The Road Tonight,” made Stephen King’s list of 2007’s top tracks. And now with Trouble In Mind, produced by Brad Jones, Carll has co-writing credits with the likes of Ray Wylie Hubbard and guest musicians such as Dan Baird, Will Kimbrough, and Fats Kaplan. Plus it’s on the “label of the iconoclasts,” Lost Highway.

Appearing: Thursday April 24th at Schubas in Chicago.

• Read more: Hayes Carll interview

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

20. Son Seals

Shootings, fires, amputations, W.C. Handy Awards: Son Seals seemed something out of an Andrew Vachss novel, which, in fact he also was. Frank Seals also knew a raw solo or two, we’re told.

• Read more: 20 - 11

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

10. Tom Morello

Tom Morello endured 18 years in Libertyville and graduated with honors from Harvard in 1986. Neither, though, had much to do with his greatest achievement: Rage Against The Machine (sorry Audioslave, your name fit your confined music). Rage ignited Molotov cocktails of post-”Bring The Noize” rap-metal, burning up the Billboard charts and dreaming of larger targets to torch. “I eagerly await the day the United States government goes down in flames,” Morello told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. Evil Empire remains alt-rock’s most volatile success – down with tradition, up with invention. Morello’s molten guitar techniques evoked turntable scratches and Public Enemy’s noise-effect cacophony. No DJ or PE required.

• Read more: 10. Tom Morello

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

9. Curtis Mayfield

It’s easy to forget what a guitarist Curtis Mayfield was. Obscured beneath forming The Impressions, helping give voice to the Civil Rights movement, recording one of the greatest soundtracks of all-time, and his nearly fatal accident was an ace. Blurring his skill further was the fact his big solo hits (”Superfly,” “If There’s A Hell Below”) were bass-driven. But his style wasn’t so subtle to be unnoticeable. Self-taught, Mayfield often tuned to a piano’s black keys, though Vee-Jay Records’ Calvin Carter explained it best in a 1981 interview: “I never met a guitar player who played the guitar the way Curtis did. Everything was on open strings, and it sounded very unusual. I don’t care where you’d go, you’d always hear people say, ‘Play me some Curtis Mayfield-type guitar,’ and they’d know what you were talking about.”

– Steve Forstneger

20 - 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

8. Rick Nielsen

Rick Nielsen deserves a spot on this list for his guitar collection alone; he has reportedly owned more than 2,000 sweet axes, including at least one custom five-neck Hamer with 38 strings. (Storage space must be cheap in Rockford.) Equally impressive is his contribution to power pop. Nielsen is a master of sustain (how he stretches those chords on “Surrender”) and showboating (as a white Chuck Berry on “I Want You To Want Me”). So what if he’s self-taught? Without Nielsen, Robin Zander’s vocals wouldn’t have been so dreamy, and rock ‘n’ roll wouldn’t be so fun. At Budokan knows best.

– Mike Meyer

20 - 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

7. Elmore James

All electric slide-guitar playing starts with Elmore James. Argue all you want whether he stole his songs from Robert Johnson or Tampa Red or whoever, because back in the day he was playing with them all and such didn’t matter. What does matter is that in 1952 his “changety changety chang chang” slide riff on “Dust My Broom” changed everything – James electrified the blues in a way no one had heard before. It was not just electric. It was loud. It was a sound Les Paul was trying to achieve with his solid-body prototypes; a style that every kid who picks up a guitar for the first time is after; the holy grail that has been pursued by any rock guitar god worth his/her salt; and one for which it’s a damn shame that there are no known live recordings of Elmore James to serve as final testament.

– David C. Eldredge

20 - 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

6. Mike Bloomfield

According to the site’s stats, Mikebloomfield.com has averaged 60 visits a day for the last six years – not bad for a white, Jewish blues guitarist who died in 1981 and is best known for his performances on other people’s albums. Mike Bloomfield crammed a lot of playing into his brief life. As a precocious Chicago teenager in the 1950s, he was sitting in with Muddy Waters. While a member of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the mid-’60s, he helped Bob Dylan go electric. He’d been a legend for almost half his life when heroin got him at 37.

– Arsenio Orteza

20 - 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

One of the great what-ifs of blues history. Many a musician met a premature demise (frequently at their own hands), but fate was especially cruel to Samuel Gene Maghett. Struck down by a heart attack just months after a star turn at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival, the 32-year-old trailblazer passed just as he had shaken off an uneven youth. Along with Otis Rush and Buddy Guy, Magic Sam turned the West Side upside down, engraving a new sound – elegant, wild, everything – on two albums frequently ranked among the blues’ all-time greats, West Side Soul and Black Magic.

• Read more: 5. Magic Sam

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

4. Otis Rush

Revered by blues and rock musicians alike, legendary guitarist/vocalist Otis Rush is perhaps the most intense, soulful bluesman of his era. Since the ’50s, when he had his first chart-topping hit on Cobra Records, “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” Rush has gone on to influence musicians such as Michael Bloomfield, Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Santana, Luther Allison, Jeff Beck, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

• Read more: 4. Otis Rush

The 20 All-Time Greatest Chicago Guitarists

3. Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley was one of those who took blues by the hand and led it into rock. Diddley’s music includes every aspect of rock: the fuzzy, effect-wielding guitar, humor, volume (Diddley didn’t necessarily play loud, but he always sounds like he was), sex, DIY aesthetic (the man built his first guitar, for heaven’s sake), songwriting, rebellion, and – of course – rhythm. Not just any rhythm, either: that rhythm.

• Read more: 3. Bo Diddley