...and the bottom line is their role is still to be backup music to the lead singer! Know your role.

Jerry Garcia is a great example. I happen to enjoy the Dead and miss Jerry. Is he a guitar god? no. I enjoy his style and his music. It is art. I had someone one day tell me he really wasn't that great and that anyone that spent the amount of time playing could be just as good. Blank stare from me. Page et al couldn't play what Jerry could (possibly because they didn't want to) and Garcia would likely have sucked in Zepplin.

Peter Green - great. I enjoy him and the old FM too (don't even get me started on neuvo genisis vs. real genisis). But again it's art. You may enjoy him and FM more than buckingham and FM. Good on you. I can name a ton of non-mainstream musicians (obscure) that I think are great but few listen to. Better? Worse? its art.

The only true guitar god is Nigel Tufnel.

Barry Sanders was not as good as Emmit Smith regardless of offensive line. Barry would never have been on a championship team because they typically need to spend more time going forward than backwards and consistincy\predictability is at a premium. Emmit ran for space, got what he could and got up to do it again and again and again. Workhorse champion, not flashy non champion. It is the same reason Larry Bird was better than Dr. J. I am sure we can all agree that Miller Lite does not taste great but is less filling. And lets not forget Gene Simmons. Now that dude can lay down a mean bass line.

There is a great story about how Merl got Jerry hooked on Art Tatum. Some of the ways jerry wove his music were influenced by Tatum as well. I will check out Grady Martin.

EDIT

Found it

In Saunders' memory, his first couple of Matrix gigs with Garcia and Vitt were without John Kahn and very loose. But once the quartet started playing together regularly at the Keystone Korner and the New Monk in Berkeley (later renamed the Keystone Berkeley), the music began to go in all sorts of interesting directions. Whereas the gig with Howard Wales was almost completely free-form and all instrumental, the quartet with Merl jammed out on some of his own funk-oriented original songs, Motown and R&B tunes (usually sung by Garcia), and jazz standards, which were something new for Garcia.

“That required a whole lot of quick education for me, and Merl was responsible for that,” Garcia said. “He really helped me improve myself on a level of harmonic understanding. Playing with him required a whole different style from three-chord rock 'n' roll or even 10-chord rock 'n' roll; it was a whole different thing. But what I was able to bring to that situation was the ability to use odd-length runs in conventional formats. I was able to use ideas that were rhythmically uneven because of working in odd time signatures so much with the Dead.”

Garcia said that working with Merl also taught him a great deal about musical structure: “He filled me in on all those years of things I didn't do. I'd never played any standards; I'd never played in dance bands. I never had any approach to the world of regular, straight music. He knows all the standards, and he taught me how bebop works. He taught me music. Between the combination of Howard and Merl, that's where I really learned music. Before it was sort of, ‘OK, where do I plug in?’ I picked up the adult version of a music attitude from those guys."

Merl says that Garcia was an eager and gifted pupil with an insatiable desire to learn new things, whether it was working off a relatively easy tune like “My Funny Valentine” or some incredibly complex number by the supremely gifted pianist Art Tatum, who became one of Garcia's favorite musicians. “I saw Art Tatum play when I was about 15 years old and I got so disgusted I stopped playing piano,” Saunders said with a laugh. “I thought, 'What's the point?' He was so amazing you could never hope to be that good in your wildest dreams. I was hurt; I was crushed. But he was a genius, and of course I came to appreciate him more, and I actually studied him a bit. I managed to learn a few of his runs and I'd be there warming up on this stuff and Garcia would be saying, ‘Hey man, what's that run?’ ‘That's Art Tatum.’ And we'd go over them together. Then we'd be out at the Keystone in the middle of a song and all of a sudden I'd hear him doing an Art Tatum run, and I'd look over and he'd have this big smile on his face! Man, when Jerry would get on something, he'd keep going with it until he got it. He'd stumble through it at first, but he understood music so well and he had such a good memory that he could eventually get almost anything he tried down. And getting down Art Tatum is not easy — on piano or guitar.”

A year later, though, something happened that really brought the depth of their friendship into focus: When Jerry nearly died in the summer of 1986 after slipping into a diabetic coma, it was Merl more than anyone else, who literally sat by Jerry’s side and helped him regain his musical gifts—which had become scrambled and elusive following the coma—by patiently re-teaching him the fundamentals, rebuilding his skills a little at a time. And even before he was ready to attempt to play, Merl helped him get some of his strength back: “I'd take him for a walk. We'd take 10 steps, then take 10 steps back. His attitude was great. He wanted to get better, but he was scared, too. He got tired very easily, but he never really got discouraged. The most he'd say would be, ‘Oh man, this is harder than it looks!’”

Once Garcia picked up a guitar, “It came back very slowly,” Merl said. “He had to learn chords all over again and he had a lot of trouble remembering how to do even the simplest stuff. And I didn't want to push him. ‘Man, I'm tired.’ He'd been playing for five minutes. ‘OK, that's fine. Put it down. Let's go for a walk.’ And we'd do that for a few minutes until he'd get tired. We'd talk about music. I'd tell him about songs I was working on and that would get his mind going. We'd talk in musical terms. And slowly he started to get his strength back. But it sometimes took an hour or two for him to get even a simple chord down. Then, as we got farther into it, some things started to come back to him a little, but it took a lot of work. The first song he wanted to learn again was ‘My Funny Valentine.’”

In Saunders' memory, his first couple of Matrix gigs with Garcia and Vitt were without John Kahn and very loose. “

Man, I forgot all about the Matrix. That was a great little club. Sat maybe a couple hundred people, served apple cider and donuts. The biggest bands played there from Butterfield to The Airplane. $2.50 to get in for two or three groups. Best show I ever saw there was Quicksilver, The Youngbloods, and The Santana Blues Band. Thems was da days

Steve Vai just on technical brilliance

Joe on just plain good song writing

and Randy was an accomplished Classical gutar player.

just my 2 cents.

Smoke em if ya got em.

Ian Anderson is without a doubt the best flute player in rock history.

Why you wanna dis on Zamfir?

Edge

Jack White

Prince

(Just supplying a few names of guitarists that are not dead or in retirement homes.)

Don't be mixin' no pan-flute with da' real tang here.

A flute is a flute.

Don't say that in front of TW.

Really? You may not like their music but they are all VERY good guitarists. Jack White is recognized as one of the best in the business today, as far as that goes. Slash and The Edge are both self-taught naturals who have put their own unique stamp on rock guitar and Prince is a Hendrix student with incredible chops. Dislike their music all you want but they ARE great guitarists.

i ended up with (and in no way a order of greatness)

Joe Satriani

Eddie Van Halen

Steve Vai

Eric Johnson

Kerry King

Randy Rhoades

Zakk Wylde

Yngwie Malmstein

Alex Lifeson

Prince

Nuno Bettencourt

nowhere as good as the flute player from The Mamas & The Papas [sarcasm]

I saw Eric Johnson open for Joe Satriani a few years ago. There was no doubt in my mind I was witnessing two of the best guitarists on the planet. If you haven't yet you should check out a few videos on Youtube of Tommy Emmanuel. I saw him in a very small venue a few years ago and he absolutely blew my mind. The BEST fingerpicking I have ever heard. That man is a legend already. His young friend who opened for him, Kieran Murphy, is someone to watch for, a rare talent himself.