The Greatest Guitar Movies of All Time

[Editor’s Note: picking up on the music theme from Steve Greaves’ review below of the “Gemini Rising” web series, LFM contributor David Ross talks guitar movies today.]

By David Ross. Here is Guitar World’s list of the fifty greatest guitar-oriented albums. Any list that prefers Blizzard of Ozz to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is, to say the least, mentally and emotionally defective.

We have still not caught up with Electric Ladyland. The twin monuments of “Voodoo Child” (the long version) and “1983” are markers of rock at its farthest extreme of creativity, expressive freedom and jazz-like virtuosity, but I am equally stunned by what seem – at first blush – the album’s more modest tracks: “Crosstown Traffic,” “Long Hot Summer Night,” “Electric Ladyland,” “Gypsy Eyes,” “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” “All Along the Watchtower.”  Each of these tunes is modest in comparison only to others on the album; on their own terms, they exceed in intricacy and originality and exuberant power just about anything ever done in the history of rock. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who never achieved anything like this dizzying, preternatural mastery.

In response to the stupidity of Guitar World, let me offer a brief list of guitar-related movies and concert films that are bound to interest the aficionado:

• Wes Montgomery: In Europe 1965 (1965)
• Devil Got my Woman (1966), featuring Skip James, Son House, etc.
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at Monterey (1967)
• Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1969)
• Jimi Plays Berkeley (1971)
• Jimi Hendrix (1973), the standard biopic
• Joe Pass 75 (1975)
• John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Paco De Lucia: Meeting of the Spirits (1979)
• Leo Kottke: Home & Away Revisited (1988)
• Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: Live at the El Mocambo 1983 (1991)
• The Search for Robert Johnson (1992)
• Paco De Lucia: Light and Shade (1994)
• Led Zeppelin (2003), featuring a mélange of concert footage
• Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (2003)
• Jeff Beck: Live at Ronnie Scotts (2007)
• Les Paul: Chasing Sound (2007)
• It Might Get Loud (2008), featuring Jimmy Page, Jack White, and the Edge
• Remember Shakti: The Way of Beauty (2008), featuring John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain

Here is Jimi Hendrix in a unique performance on an acoustic twelve-string, from Joe Boyd’s 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix.

I should particularly mention Meeting of the Spirits, which offers more or less undigested footage of Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary are in for a surprise: imagine instead a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed.  Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely.  During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason.  Meeting of the Spirits leaves no question that only Jimi Hendrix has more deeply plumbed the possibilities of the guitar, and that McLaughlin belongs with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus in the starriest pantheon of post-bop jazz.  Meeting of the Spirits, by the way, was merely preparatory.  There followed an even more impressive McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration, captured for posterity on the classic concert album Friday Night in San Francisco.