Classic Rock magazine named Jimmy Page‘s Stairway to Heaven the greatest guitar solo of all time.
The verdict was made by a panel of critics, bands, and readers for the magazine’s Top 100 list. Epochal Comfortably Numb by David Gilmour falls into second place.
Jimmy Page talked to Classic Rock about how the solo came together:
“The solo was done very quickly – in actual fact there were already layers underneath, the bottleneck you can hear was on before the solo…I had a couple of cracks at it because you didn’t have as many options as you would have now. Back then you had 16 tracks and could only put guitar solos down where the vocal wasn’t…You’d save maybe three tracks to lay guitar solos into which meant you could have two or three cracks at it and then choose the best.”
He also told the magazine that it’s not his favorite work:
“Is Stairway To Heaven my best Zeppelin guitar solo? No, but it’s pretty damn good….If everyone else says it’s my best solo then that’s great, that’s good, but there are others that I prefer.”
Check out their Top 10 picks:
- Jimmy Page/Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven
- David Gilmour/ Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb
- Don Felder and Joe Walsh/Eagles – Hotel California
- Allen Collins/Lynyrd Skynyrd – Freebird
- Jimi Hendrix/The Jimi Hendrix Experience – All Along The Watchtower
- Eddie Van Halen/Van Halen – Eruption
- Brian May/Queen – Killer Queen
- Slash/GN’R – Sweet Child Of Mine
- Prince/Prince And The Revolution – Purple Rain
- Tony Iommi/Black Sabbath – Paranoid
Featured image: Jimmy Page during the final solo of Stairway to Heaven at A.R.M.S. Concert in Oakland. 1983 Andrew Smith, via Flickr.