10 classic songs ruined by annoying guitar solos (2024)

In any great rock song, the guitar solo is as important as any vocal melody. The singer might be the one at the front of the stage, but it takes a special kind of talent to create a musical feature that people can sing along to more than the chorus. Making those kinds of statements is a true art, but artists like the Beastie Boys have turned in a handful of solos that get more points for weirdness than technique.

Then again, this is not to critique the technique of any specific guitar player. Each of these musicians has made some great music in the past and has even turned in guitar solos that should be given a spot among the musical heavens. There is such a thing as cold feet during recording, and whether it was apprehension or what, nerves got the better of them whenever they made their grand statements.

There are also several moments where the solos themselves are poorly constructed. Unlike musicians who use their guitars to tell a story, many of the solos here sound as if the artists either lack full control of their instruments or are unsure of what they’re doing during the final take.

So, instead of some grandiose ending to a track, album, or music passage, a lot of these solos just make you wonder what the hell you just listened to before returning to the rest of the tune. Many guitar legends have been known to make the guitar speak, but for as much effort as the musicians put into the tune, the solo ends up saying very little.

10 annoying guitar solos in classic songs:

10. ‘Dream On’ – Yngwie Malmsteen

Anyone trying to do justice to a rock classic needs to be extremely careful. Even if it isn’t that old, it’s important that someone puts their individual stamp on it while also doing a halfway decent job at paying tribute to their inspiration. While Yngwie Malmsteen definitely had his heart in the right place when teaming up with Ronnie James Dio for ‘Dream On’, his ego probably got in the way when putting together the solo.

Before we look at Malmsteen’s, let’s take a look at the original. Since this was one of the first official power ballads, part of the reason the Aerosmith classic works is how understated it is. Joe Perry’s guitar breaks are the textbook definition of why less is more, but apparently, that advice never reached across the pond for when Malmsteen was tracking the tune.

While Dio’s performance is at least on par with what Steven Tyler did, hearing Malmsteen play scalar runs up and down the fretboard sounds less like he enjoys the tune and more like he wants an excuse to shred and make people gawk at how impressive his technique. Yes, we are all proud that he can play that fast, but in the context of the actual song, no one really cares.

9. ‘Champagne Supernova’ – Oasis

Noel Gallagher never claimed to be the greatest guitarist in the world. He could put together a halfway decent tune when starting Oasis, yet Definitely Maybe seemed like both the beginning and the end of him being looked at as a guitar hero alongside the likes of Steve Jones. His focus was more on songwriting, so bringing in Paul Weller on ‘Champagne Supernova’ should have been a guitar fireworks show, right?

For any other rock band, getting someone like Weller to play on a track would be the chance of a lifetime, but the psychedelic haze never gave the Jam frontman his just due. While Noel performs the bridge solos, Weller’s guitar break alongside Noel’s lead guitar is so quiet in the mix that you can barely hear what he’s playing. Even when there is a melodic section, it gets swallowed up by a layer of backing vocals singing along to the chorus.

Fans weren’t the only ones pissed off, either, with Weller eventually saying that he wished that he was turned up a bit more in the mix on the final take. Even though it would be hard putting any solo together, getting a guitar god on the record only to bury him is like having a slam dunk and then somehow scoring for the opposite team.

8. ‘Cover of The Rolling Stone’ – Dr Hook

Once the 1960s ended, the guitar gods were set to take over the world. Despite losing Jimi Hendrix at the start of the 1970s, Eric Clapton was still a god among men, and Jimmy Page was about to reinvent the wheel of rock and roll with Led Zeppelin. It’s easy to get a bit too crowded if you played a six-string, so Dr Hook and the Medicine Show didn’t even attempt to put together a ‘Guitar Player of the Year’ solo.

Then again, I almost want to give this track the benefit of the doubt. The whole record is meant to be a piss-take on people who only want to focus on who’s on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, so playing the most amateur guitar solo known to man should have been a nice piece of meta-commentary on the rock scene. But not all jokes got to the point where they gave up on structure.

Yes, the solo is terrible, and yes, that was what they were going for, but this is the kind of terrible that comes from someone who has downed a couple of beers and goes up to his friend’s band and says that he wants to “sit in” for a tune. There’s a way to pull off this kind of humour effectively, yet all this solo does is immediately piss someone off when they hear it.

7. ‘Driven to Tears’ – The Police

The Police never tried to do anything based on what the people wanted. For as much as people were interested in ratty hair and spiked denim jackets, Sting’s melodies were far too powerful to ignore half the time. ‘Driven to Tears’ may have just been another dip into jazz territory, but someone really needed to tell Andy Summers to dial things back a bit.

Since the entire genre was leaning towards punk rock, Summers’s guitar solo seems like it was intended to be an atonal mess. While there’s certainly room for abstract guitar players in the world like The Velvet Underground, all it does is clash next to the rest of the track, almost like getting a shot of cold water to make sure that no one had fallen asleep playing the album.

Granted, the solo might have made a good solo if it had been put into a bonkers Frank Zappa tune, but in a track that feels this warm, it’s insane what compelled them to say that this guitar break was just what they needed. For all of The Police’s great experimental tunes, this was just the right solo at the wrong time.

6. ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ – Ramones

The number one rule that Ramones guaranteed throughout their career was that we would never have to worry about them playing guitar solos. That was reserved for the more pretentious side of rock music, and no amount of musical masturbation was going to get in the way of them delivering their tunes to the masses. So when they broke their one rule on ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’, it felt more like a cruel joke than anything else.

Since the track isn’t the most complicated thing in the world, breaking things up with a guitar solo could have been a little bit of a palette cleanser. That is, if Johnny Ramone could have been bothered to actually play another note. Because outside of the open E string, there are no other notes in this solo, usually just hanging on those few notes before changing key.

If anything, it’s easy to just picture the studio scene when they were running this session, with Johnny looking at the producer deviously as he just stops playing chords and plays one note. People like Neil Young have been able to get away with a handful of one-note guitar breaks before, but Johnny sounds like he just got tired in the studio and figured he’d try to troll his own audience.

5. ‘Honey Don’t’ – The Beatles

Hang on! Yes, I know, the idea of putting any Beatles tune on a list like this seems sacrilege, and there’s no doubt that some sort of musical higher power is bound to judge me for it. But if George Harrison had seriously tried to pass off ‘Honey Don’t’ as a legitimate solo, then he probably was never that comfortable with it to begin with.

While the first Beatles albums flip-flop between originals and covers most of the time, Beatles for Sale has by far their flimsiest cover performances. While Harrison does do a decent job at covering Carl Perkins’s ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’, hearing him tear through the ‘Honey Don’t’ just sounds like a solo naturally should be there, and he just forgot what he was doing.

Not even Ringo Starr’s charm can save it, either, eventually calling for Harrison to rock on for a little bit and only getting a handful of chords out of him before just going back to the same bluesy progression. Then again, could you really blame them? They had been run ragged by Beatlemania, and since their originals were getting more interesting by the minute, putting the finishing touches on yet another 12-bar blues-style track was the last thing on their minds at that point.

4. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – The Rolling Stones

And since we’re on a British Invasion kick, it’s about time that we take a look at The Rolling Stones’ history of guitarists. Although Keith Richards seems poised to remain on rhythm guitar until the day he dies, presumably in 2092, having Brian Jones and Mick Taylor come through the group is still one of the most impressive blues rock legends to be in one group since The Yardbirds. In the in-between period, Richards was the lonewolf guitarist, and his performance on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ got ruined by the production.

It’s hard to critique the solo itself, though. Richards is more than capable as a lead guitarist, and the solo’s individual lines are actually pretty tasty compared to the rest of the tune. At the same time, it would be nice if everyone didn’t have to risk getting tinnitus whenever they listened to it in their headphones.

Compared to the rest of the track, Richards’s guitar tone doesn’t fit the mood at all, coming off less like a guitar and more like someone manually shoving notes into your ear as you listen. There’s probably some violation that comes from making a track this abrasive, but until there are laws in place for pop songs being used as a form of sonic assault, we’ll just have to live with a guitar that hurts to listen to.

3. All of Kill Em All – Metallica

The evolution of Kirk Hammett as a guitar player has been an absolute journey to watch. Though he was clearly the right man for the job in Metallica and developed into one of the tastiest blues players in the 1990s, his knowledge of writing great melodic fragments usually fell by the wayside in favour of an ungodly amount of wah-wah pedal effects and bluesy bending. And it’s not like this is all that new, considering what happened on Kill Em All back in the early 1980s.

Then again, Metallica was already up against a major time crunch. They had to get the entire album in the can within a few days, so there was no room for Hammett to pour over his solos and come up with something that he liked. So, for the entire album, there are a lot of notes that either aren’t hit correctly or are incredibly sloppy as he’s flying up and down the fretboard.

It does make for some weird sonic moments, like the diminished run in ‘Motorbreath,’ but the majority of the solos feel like giving a kid with only a few years of guitar experience a chance to jam over a couple of chords. While his leads are incredibly sloppy, sometimes it’s better to learn on the fly so you can be prepared for when the next classic comes along.

2. ‘21 Guns’ – Green Day

Part of the punk rock vocabulary is not having any guitar solos whatsoever. Every punk band was about not boring their audience, and giving them the chance to take in some massive lead line was never going to go over well with purists. For all the great music Green Day made outside of punk rock, though, how did they not check their sources when it came to ‘21 Guns’.

On the surface, it’s pretty easy to defend ‘21 Guns’s solo, since most of it is extremely melodic and follows the chord changes perfectly. For anyone who grew up in the 1990s, though, hearing those opening notes doesn’t conjure up punk rock rebellion as much as it does a red convertible with a baby stroller in the middle of it.

My apologies to anyone in the dark about this, but most of this guitar passage is ripped directly out of the theme music to Full House, even having the same jumps in the melody and only broken up towards the very end of the solo when Billie Joe Armstrong starts noodling a little bit. Green Day has made a series of genre hops and still maintained their punk credentials, but it’s hard not to look at this tale of struggle and survival and not picture the pre-fame Olson twins alongside John Stamos and Bob Saget.

1. ‘Fight For Your Right’ – Beastie Boys

While guitar solos have always been limited to rock and roll, there was always room for them to grow out in other genres. Eminem featuring Joe Perry on ‘Sing for the Moment’ to play another solo was inspired, and one of the tastiest solos of the entire 1980s can be found on the outro of Lionel Richie’s ‘Running With the Night’. Since the Beastie Boys weren’t far away from rock, it made sense that they would play a solo, so why does ‘Fight For Your Right’ sound like listening to a beginner guitarist’s first recital?

Getting Kerry King from Slayer for the solo on ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ was definitely a change of pace, but having this knuckle-dragging anthem come directly after that undercuts it just a little bit. Despite having no bum notes in the mix, the stuttering rhythm and the bends that sound ever-so-slightly out of tune sound like one of them got ahold of the guitar in the studio and didn’t bother doing another take because it would have been too much effort.

Then again, it does kind of go with the spirit of the tune. The message of partying until the break of dawn and being as obnoxious as possible usually means having someone playing guitar at an insanely loud volume, but there’s only so many times people can listen to it before someone tells Eddie Van Halen over there that they’ve had too much to drink and should crash for the night.

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