17   Jack White
of the White Stripes

White has become the hottest new thing on six strings by celebrating the oldest tricks in the book: distortion, feedback, plantation blues, the 1960s-Michigan riff terrorism of the Stooges and the MC5. Onstage, decked out like a peppermint dandy, he violates classic covers (Dolly Parton's "Jolene," Bob Dylan's "Isis") with fireball chords and primal, bent-string scream. He is also an acute orchestrator in the studio, stirring the scratchy-78s atmosphere of Blind Willie Johnson sides, 1970s punk and Led Zeppelin-style drama into his own howl. Don't pay attention to the notes; White is not a clean soloist. He's a blowtorch.


Essential Recording: "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself," Elephant (2003)

18   John Frusciante
of the Red Hot Chili Peppers

In 1989, Eighteen-year-old John Frusciante, a bedroom-guitar prodigy from California's San Fernando Valley who had never played in a group before, auditioned for his favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He got the job — replacing Hillel Slovak, who died of a drug overdose in 1988 — and transformed the Peppers' rascally punk funk into beefy arena pop. On the 1992 multiplatinum album, BloodSugarSexMagik, Frusciante fortified the band's bone-hard grooves with a mix of Hendrixian force and, in the hit ballad "Under the Bridge," poignant Beatlesque melody. When Frusciante abruptly quit the Peppers in the middle of a Japanese tour in 1992, he left a big hole in the group's sound that was only filled with his drug-free return on the Peppers' 1999 comeback album, Californication.


Essential Recording: "Under the Bridge," BloodSugarSexMagik (1991)