13   Jerry Garcia
of the Grateful dead

Garcia was a folk and blue-grass obsessive who started playing guitar at fifteen. It was those roots, as well as a lifelong love of Chuck Berry, that gave his astral experiments with the Grateful Dead a sense of forward momentum. Garcia could dazzle on slide ("Cosmic Charlie") or pedal steel ("Dire Wolf"), but his natural home was playing lead onstage, exploring the frontier of psychedelic sound. The piercing lyricism of this tone was all the more remarkable for the fact that he was missing the third finger of his right hand — the result of a childhood accident while he and his brother Tiff were chopping wood. He died in 1995 in rehab for his longtime drug habit. But his guitar still shines like a headlight on a northbound train.

Essential Recording: "Cryptical Envelopment," Hundred Year Hall (1995)

14   Jeff Beck

Beck was the second of the Yardbirds' three star guitarists, leading the group's swing into R&B- charged psychedelia ("Shapes of Things," "Over Under Sideways Down") with his speed and deft manipulation of feedback and sustain. In 1967, Beck formed his own heavier variation on the Yardbirds — the Jeff Beck Group, with then-unknown singer Rod Stewart — which added heavy-metal pow to British blues and became a major role model for Jimmy Page's Led Zeppelin. But Beck's commercial peak came in the mid-1970s, with an idiosyncratic style of jazz fusion (whiplash melodies; artful, roaring distortion; whammy-bar hysterics) that he still plays today with undiminished class and ferocity, when he isn't in his garage at home in England working under the hoods of vintage cars.


Essential Recording: "Beck's Bolero," Truth (1968)