And that's why I wrote it that way, Kenny, because, as I stated before, the list, without the article and individual profiles that go with it, isn't worth a whole lot.
It's a little like showing the AP Top 25 ranked college football teams list to someone but not having anything to say about why USC is ranked number 3.
For whatever reason Rolling Stone has kept the list on the internet as an active link.
I'm not being critical of you for starting a thread based on the list, so if you are taking it that way, please don't. As evidenced by part of the statement from their table of contents-even having read the article, they expected disagreements.
It wasn't your fault you didn't have the information. It seems like a legitimate subject for which to start a thread in the Music section on the Forum.
Aside from the fact that I still have a copy of the magazine, it appears that almost no one else even recalls having read the thing when it came out a few years ago.
So the title of the list, without any additional explanation, as I cited in an earlier post, would appear that they left off obvious choices like Chet Atkins, or a number of jazz greats, when it becomes clear when you have the copy in your hand that it is about rock and roll and guitar players that had significant influence, not who is the best guitar player period, regardless of genre.
I have no association with the Rolling Stone, other than the fact that it started as a much smaller time publication in San Francisco in the late 60's, and my brothers and I used to eagerly await a new issue every two weeks. Plus being a Bay Area boy it was local to us-just like the first ever FM rock station, KMPX, and after the DJ's walked out on strike, led by Tom Donahue, they formed a new station, the legendary KSAN, where the DJ's had a lot of freedom to play tracks off of albums, way before there was ever the dreaded Clear Channel. San Francisco was THE place for rock music back then, and the Rolling Stone was the locally owned magazine that wrote about it. It is not the same magazine it was by a long shot, it has become more general coverage, but there is still some good musical writing and content-but it has been many years since I last had a subscription.
Jann Wenner moved the operation to New York many years ago, because that is the capital of the publishing industry, and he wanted to go "big time" with it. As I said, I still read it once in awhile, but the mag was never the same after the move to New York from San Francisco. It lost a lot of the "grassroots" feeling it had from the early years.
Some of the best rock music writers wrote for RS for years. People like Ralph J. Gleason, Jon Landau, Cameron Crowe, Ben Fong-Torres, and Greil Marcus, to name a few. It was one of the first publications to legitimize writing about the subject of rock music (though punkers like Johnny Ramone and Sid Vicious would be adamantly against that sort of thing-the intellectualizing of the music).
But since all the others who have participated in the thread didn't have a copy in front of them like I do, I felt a responsibility to at least point out that they're not getting the whole story of the list without the article itself, and there were a number of negative posts scoffing and dismissing the magazine like they're a bunch of idiots and dillettantes, who have no clue about what they were writing. The fact is, when you have the article in front of you, and you read the reason RS has a player on the list, you might say to yourself, "Yeah-I can see that, that makes sense."
And as far as disagreeing with at least a dozen names on the list-they even expected that sort of thing, as evidenced by how they wrote the introduction. It's the same deal as a few guys sitting around in a bar with beer and pretzels arguing about the all-time best baseball players at each position-of course there is going to be disagreement, because there is no way you can legitimately quantify such a thing-and rating musicians is going to be even more difficult because of the somewhat abstract nature of the subject, hence the great saying "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Though that doesn't mean there is anything wrong in trying.
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Mark
<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Mark Eaton on 19 October 2006 at 02:23 AM.]</p></FONT>
as saying that they're just "journeymen".
), but then... what's great? And we probably don't want to go there 
