Joe Walsh: “The 12 Best All-Time-Forever Guitar Solos”

In 1988, Joe Riffed on the Solos That Shook His World

When I interviewed Joe Walsh for his April 1988 Guitar Player cover story, I made a special request. Would he be willing to go through his record collection and choose his 12 favorite guitar solos? Joe happily agreed and got to work doing choosing songs and making notes. A few days later he dictated his findings to me. Here they are, in his own words.

These are what I consider to be the 12 best all-time-forever guitar solos. They aren’t in any particular order. I don’t think the first one is better than the fifth one. My next favorite dozen solos would be by people who stole licks from these 12 guys—including me!

Joe Maphis

Joe Maphis on Ricky Nelson’s “Stood Up” or James Burton on “Fools Rush In”—wow! These guys and Carl Perkins—“Blue Suede Shoes” and all that stuff—didn’t have anybody to listen to. They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t even know it was rock and roll. They didn’t have a chance to study John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers or Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Beck. I respect those guys because they didn’t cop any licks. They made those licks up, and that’s the foundation that all of us guitar players learned from. James Burton often played some incredible stuff with Ricky Nelson.

The Ventures

I don’t really know if it’s a solo or not, but I’d have to say that the song “Walk—Don’t Run” by the Ventures changed an awful lot of guitar players’ lives. It was one of the foundational instrumentals. It made instrumentals okay to do, and it led the way for things like the Surfari’s “Wipe Out,” the Tornadoes’ “Telestar,” and the Rockin’ Teens’ “Wild Weekend.” It had been done before with Duane Eddy, but with the Ventures America discovered the tremolo bar.

I didn’t even play guitar at the time, but I loved “Walk—Don’t Run.” I was 13 when that came out in 1960, and I borrowed a guitar just to learn the lead part. At the time, my mom was making me practice a stupid metal clarinet in orchestra. A lot of people ended up playing guitar because of that song.

We used to look at the album cover of The Ventures [on Dolton], and nobody could believe that there was a Fender Jazzmaster and a Fender Strat and a perfect Precision. Later on the Ventures went to Mosrite, and those guitars stink! But that band and that particular song really paved the way for a whole new approach to instrumentals, and lead guitar became so much more important in the song.