Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, has named what she thinks is the best guitar solo ever recorded – and, according to her, it should be played note-for-note at all costs.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, St. Vincent named 1976 Steely Dan classic Kid Charlemagne, which also clinched the eighth spot on the publication's recent list of the greatest guitar solos. Steely Dan’s Peg, released a year later, is also another favorite of Clark’s.
“Those guitar solos on [1976 album] The Royal Scam are so iconic that I want to hear them verbatim,” Clark asserts.
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“I don’t want to hear someone improvise and stretch out and be completely extemporaneous – even the great guitar players that they’ve had onstage. I want to hear the [session guitar legend] Larry Carlton solo note-for-note. That’s the testament to how great it is. It’s sacrosanct, compositionally.”
According to Steely Dan lore, it took around two hours for Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to figure out the 50-second solo that defined their fifth studio album, The Royal Scam – as confirmed by Carlton himself in a 1981 Guitar World interview.
“I did maybe two hours' worth of solos that we didn’t keep,” he recalled.
“Then I played the first half of the intro, which they loved, so they kept that. I punched in for the second half. So it was done in two parts and the solo that fades out in the end was done in one pass.”
Carlton went on to say that the duo's demands were “so high” that the The Royal Scam sessions were “grueling.”
“We cut tunes six or seven times with different drummers,” he explained.
“I was pretty fed up and thinking, ‘Are those guys ever going to be happy with what I do?’ When I heard the record, then I realized that I wasn’t the person that should be judging them at all. I knew how hard they worked on it, but I saw why. It was just outstanding.”
In more recent news, Carlton revealed how he became part of a very select group of guitarists to work on records by the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
