My favorites are Richard Thompson and Jimi Hendrix. I never appreciated Hendrix at the time, but I revisited his stuff later on. He had a way to express with the instrument that everybody since has tried to copy. Richard is an expressive player, but he's also so gifted technically. To see Richard live is pretty scary. I saw him seven or eight years ago at Maxwell's, in Hoboken, New Jersey, doing an acoustic show. I was floored. He has so much control over the instrument. It's humiliating to go see him and somebody says, "You're a guitar player, too?" Compared to him, not really.
I also like rhythm players -- Johnny Ramone and Roger McGuinn especially. McGuinn could cut a pretty big wall of sound with a twelve-string. The first Ramones record is my favorite guitar album, because there weren't any solos. It was just the guitars hanging over one speaker and the bass guitar hanging on the other one. That's the record that showed me that anybody could play music.
