Some weeks in rock history are quiet. This is not one of them. The stretch from September 14 to 20 handed us a guitar god’s last breath, a Senate showdown, and one of the loudest release days the genre has ever seen. If there is a thread running through all of it, it is this: rock has never once asked permission, and it is not about to start.
The night the guitar lost its king
On September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found unresponsive in a London flat at the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill. He was 27. The coroner returned an open verdict, and people are still arguing about the circumstances five decades later, but the loss was never in doubt. In barely four years in the spotlight, Hendrix rewired what an electric guitar could do, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would later call him the most gifted instrumentalist of all time. He was inducted posthumously in 1992, which tells you everything you need to know. We are still catching up to a man who has been gone since Nixon’s first term. So here is the debate we will never settle, and honestly do not want to: has anyone actually surpassed him, or do we just keep measuring everyone else against Jimi?
The bluesman who loaded the gun
Two days earlier on the calendar, on September 16, 1925, a boy named Riley B. King was born in Berclair, Mississippi. The world would come to know him as B.B. King, and every screaming rock solo you love owes him a royalty. Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray, all of them bent notes the way B.B. taught the world to bend them. It is a good reminder that rock’s rebellion was built on the blues, and the blues were built by people the establishment ignored for decades. The apple did not fall far from that tree.
One Tuesday, two monsters (and a metal classic)
Fast forward to September 17, 1991, maybe the single most stacked release day in hard rock. Guns N’ Roses dropped Use Your Illusion I and II at the same midnight, two separate albums instead of the usual bloated double, and Ozzy Osbourne put out No More Tears on the very same day (it went on to move more than four million copies). Rewind to 1979 and September 17 also gave us Judas Priest’s Unleashed in the East, the live record that helped define what metal was supposed to sound like. Some dates just know what they are doing.
The day metal testified
And then there is September 19, 1985, the day rock had to defend itself with a straight face in a Senate hearing room. The PMRC, a group of well-connected Washington wives, wanted warning labels (and worse) slapped on records they found obscene. Against them stood the least likely trio in music history: Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, who showed up in denim and shades and calmly took the case against him apart piece by piece. They lost the sticker fight, which is where “Parental Advisory” comes from, but they won the argument. Snider in front of the Senate is still one of the proudest afternoons metal ever had.
One more goodbye worth marking this week: on September 15, 2019, Ric Ocasek of The Cars died at 75, the deadpan cool at the center of some of the sharpest rock songs the new-wave era produced.
Over to you
So we will ask the question this week was practically built for. Who is the greatest guitarist rock has ever produced, Hendrix or somebody you will fight us to defend? Make your case in the comments. We are not gonna take “it’s subjective” for an answer.
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