POLL: SPIN's Greatest Guitarists of All Time

as a teenager i had some older punker dude lecture me on what a fraud greg ginn was too! does it have to do w/ a deep-seated anti-Hermosa Beach bias?

no, it has to do with him being a truly terrible guitarist. HB's ok by me

The guitarist claims Black Flag practiced about six hours every night.

Yeah a friend has stories about hearing Ginn practice for hours every day and the dude never getting any better.

Ginn is really a ham handed fucker.

The poll results in this were even worse than the original list-which I shocking since that list sucked so bad

there are a lot of popular arguments against ginn but i'd never heard any that had much to do with whether he was sufficiently skilled at his instrument relative to his contemporaries

Really? Greg Ginn's technical skill is taken as a given?

no, i just mean he was part of a scene/era in which chops were not a must

Oh, well, yeah.

i think his later lead playing is p innovative

Examples?

All the later albums tortured atonal strangling the guitar to death solos, figured he must have been a big influence on kerry king

What are some good tracks to check out? I don't know the album tracks.

(I did listen to the track that Spin singled out and wasn't really blown away. I can believe that it might not be the best example, however, considering their choices in other cases.)

(The sound on the video wasn't that great, admittedly. I'll look for a better-sounding version on Grooveshark.)

Nels Cline 0

rip ksh

love ginn's guitar playing, though he's obviously not the most fleet-fingered guy out there. the appeal is mostly in the riffs, tone, violence and roughness of his sound. he's a "great guitar player" in the same sense that henry rollins is a "great singer". they're both extremely limited, but in a way that suits the band's attack, makes them sound all the more brutal, anti and fucked-up. at least that's how i related to ginn & black flag when i was young. i liked the cro-mag quality. whether or not it was intentional, it sounded cool to me.

yeah word. also a lot of his stuff is kind of bluesy in a way most hardcore ended up not being (see: nervous breakdown)

Nels Cline was my #2 choice (but not primarily for Wilco).

anyway, i voted for john fahey based on quantity and overall quality of output.

just as easily could have gone for eddie hazel or robert fripp. hazel's responsible for my favorite single piece of guitar music ("maggot brain"), and fripp's played on a bunch of recordings i like almost as much (king crimson stuff, no pussyfooting and here come the warm jets (esp "baby's on fire"), heroes, "i zimbra", etc.)

Nels Cline was my #2 choice (but not primarily for Wilco).

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Sunday, May 27, 2012 3:59 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

ditto

Do you like Initiate? I love it.

seeing clime play guitar with a vibrator in the geraldine fibbers really blew my mind as a young college kid

Ha, Nels Cline in Anvil tribute shocker! Tbh, I don't know the Geraldine Fibbers. I love the Nels Cline Singers, solo Cline, and some of his 'out' jazz collaborations though.

Hm, Fibbers are sounding pretty good.

They did a couple of classic albums imo

They didn't really sound like X but they are the only band that gives me the same feeling as early X

11 people voted correctly

Almost voted that way

Fibbers-era Cline is great
Greg Ginn is great
Eddie Hazel is the greatest

No
No
Yes

Have you even heard nels cline?

Argh, I missed this poll it seems. Would have voted for Zappa.

yeah Geraldine Fibbers remain just a major band to me, the album before Nels joined is imo maybe the best rock record of the '90s. Initiate is great but also a double disc that came out during a really prolific period of Nels Cline output, so i prob haven't paid it enough attention.

yeah Geraldine Fibbers remain just a major band to me, the album before Nels joined is imo maybe the best rock record of the '90s.

what are the second through one-hundredth best?

ps: i'm just fuckin w/ u cause of capn lorax in that other thread. do not take that zing to heart.

[quote=Actually my favourite guy who would have been a very cool inclusion on the list is Michio Kurihara.]
good to see someone beat me to mentioning him

yeah I woulda swapped a couple of these entries out for Kurihara and Hagerty

and I ended up being the only one who voted for Andy Gill. went for him, because his probably influenced mine the most of all these people listed

real talk whiney have you heard Lost Somewhere Between The Earth And My Home? incredible album, you should check it out sometime.

great album, but I like <i>Butch</i> better

yeah the fibbers were pretty good -- better live than on record imo, at least the times I saw them. that scarnella record that cline and bozulich did was pretty damn good too.

cline's best stuff was with Watt imo

yeah, or at least def his best sideman-to-a-vocalist work

Cline's instrumental compositional/improvisational work is so much more significant to me than his rock guitar playing (and I do really like his lead guitar playing with Wilco and Lee Ranaldo).

(especially when considering as a great guitarist)

I voted Ginn.

Have always been intrigued by his lack of prowess and totally rubbish tone. He was great.
He seemed to just jam along in any key, in a way that made me think he didn't even know what key he was in and certainly his scales were unique.

Ever since I heard My War back when it was released, that twat influenced my guitar playing. What he was doing sounded so random, angry and sludgy,.It was always the easy way out and I only played on stage 7 times and my career was over.

He still deserves my vote.

Now, Greg, let somebody with a clue remaster them classic SST albums

on greg ginn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4deAZAT21xc#t=53s

Have always been intrigued by his lack of prowess and totally rubbish tone. He was great.

I think I'm putting my finger on why I never liked Black Flag that much, one or two songs aside, and Ginn especially. Maybe even why I love some classic Amerindie and am left totally cold by some.

no, i just mean he was part of a scene/era in which chops were not a must

I've actually been thinking about this. I guess it depends what you consider to be his scene/era. I really like several bands on Ginn's own label - Sonic Youth, Husker Du, fIREHOSE, Meat Puppets - all of whom seemed to place some value on musicianship. I'd probably say that in some cases they were better musicians, at least as instrumentalists, than many mainstream rock bands of that time. I realize that most of these were 'indie rock' and not 'hardcore' bands (at least as far as the records I listen to go). But, while I get that chops were not a must, even some other hardcore bands seemed to have placed a greater emphasis on tightness, e.g. Minor Threat, whom I also dislike but for different reasons.

Thinking about why I don't like something often tends to be a first step in starting to appreciate it. I used to hate Pavement for similar reasons.

figured he must have been a big influence on kerry king

Can see this btw (and I love Reign in Blood obv).

WTF?! How could this list omit Kevin Okanyra?!

(j/k I made up that name)

loved the album he did with hans bennink and joe mcphee

imo he was kind of an overrated gimmick player, it's not like the 6th and 7th fingers on his left hand really contributed to his fretwork at all

wasn't he uncredited on some of those denny vertigo peel sessions?