The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists
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| The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists | |
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| Author(s) | Joel McIver |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Guitarists, heavy metal |
| Genre(s) | Biography, non-fiction |
| Publisher | Jawbone Press |
| Publication date | January 2009 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 978-1-906002-20-6 |
The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists is a book by British author Joel McIver, published in 2009 by Jawbone Press and featuring a foreword by Glen Benton of Deicide. Foreign-language editions appeared shortly after the original English language version. It contained a list of 100 guitar players in reverse order. The majority were interviewed by the author for the book between 2005 and 2009.
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[edit] Overview
The book, McIver's fourteenth, attracted an unusual amount of attention from the guitar players listed in it, notably Dave Mustaine of the thrash metal band Megadeth, who was placed in the No. 1 spot in the book. As Mustaine told Dave Ling of Classic Rock magazine shortly after the book's publication,
"It was especially sweet when I found out that Joel has written books on Metallica. I looked at my copy of the book – I wasn’t on the cover or the back. I figured I’d be somewhere like No. 69. So I thumbed through it; it’s a really comprehensive, good book. I got to No. 50 and I thought, ‘Am I in here?’ I’d been told that I was, but not which position. I saw Hetfield. I thought, ‘Wow’ because I respect James. I’m a better lead player than he is, but he’s one of the three best rhythm players in the world… So I got to the Top 10… I still wasn’t in there. Every page I turned, I became more excited. I [see] Kirk Hammett, and I thought, ‘Thank you, God’. At that point it didn’t matter [which position I was]. To be better than both of them [Hetfield and Hammett] meant so much – it’s been one of the pet peeves of my career and I’ve never known how to deal with it. I didn’t realise that it has had so much bearing upon my life. Then I got to No. 2 and it was John Petrucci [of Dream Theater] and I froze. I was No. 1. What made it better still is that the guy wrote: ‘This isn’t about Dave as a person because he’s been a cock’ – [interjects with a bray of laughter] – ‘These four pages are about his guitar playing, which is the best. There are people who are better at one thing that Mustaine does, and others that are better than another, but no-one who’s as good at everything’. All I thought was… I win!"[1]
Explaining the concept behind the book, the author told Blabbermouth.net,
"The idea came to me a couple of years ago after I read a list of the supposed 100 best metal guitarists of all time in a popular guitar magazine that should really know better. The list contained all these non-metal guitarists like Neil Young and Kurt Cobain, so I thought, 'Fuck this!' and wrote my own list, which became an 80,000-word book. The 100 guys I've included are pure metal: there's no-one taken from the hard rock world, as much as I respect the rock shredders. This one features musicians from heavy metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, power metal, doom metal and grindcore bands and that's it."[2]
[edit] Media reception
McIver wrote on his website[3] that the book received far more attention than he had expected, with the press requesting dozens of interviews. In a three-hour special broadcast by The Classic Metal Show, the author defended his division between hard rock and heavy metal for a large American audience. He also explained that his choices had been based on a combination of each guitarist's technical skills and influence on other musicians. As he told Ultimate Guitar,
"There’s hard rock and there’s heavy metal, and it’s reasonably easy to differentiate between the two. I’m absolutely not a categories nerd and would be the first to admit that the best bands have a bit of everything in them, but in this case I wanted to celebrate the achievements of the metal musicians and no-one else. There were loads of amazing axemen who didn’t make it into the Top 100, even though they’re world-class musicians: assembling the final list was agony."
