Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.
I'm sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.
Every time I listen back to solos of mine I'll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can't stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don't think so much like that.
I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.
It was by listening to Goodman's band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.
Guitar solos bore the hell out of me. Only a few guitarists interest me, and it's not about the solos they play, it's about the grooves they create.
I kept on buying records and listening to them. Finally, I was able to hear the relationship between the jazz improvisers' solos and the underlying structure that it's based on, the chord progression. That was pretty easy to do in the swing era, y'know, when jazz was, like, pop music, you know. It had made the charts and everything like that.
I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.
On 'Metallica,' I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to play the composite solo, tightened it up and replayed it for the final version.
I would have to say I'm bored with the standard rock, guitar solos, but I've done it for five albums now, and this time I wanted to go in a completely different direction. I wasn't interested in showing off any more.