I took a few guitar lessons as a kid. My teacher tried to get me to learn "Layla." I brought him a tape of "Blitzkrieg Bop" and asked to learn those chords instead. It didn't matter as my fingers were not going to ever reproduce Eric Clapton or Johnny Ramone with any success. But during my brief time with guitar geeks (hanging in music stores), I did get plenty of time to flip through magazines like Guitar Player. Back then there was no doubt who the pros were picking as the greatest guitar player of the early 80's: Steve Morse. Who? Steve Morse! Morse won "Best Overall Guitarist" so many times back then, that he was retired from the magazine Guitar Player's competition (an honor he shares only with the much better known Steve Howe of Yes).
Morse was the leader of the Dixie Dregs, a band that would have been huge in the fusion loving 70s. That was the era that produced folks like Pat Travers, Robin Trower and (the criminally underrated) Rory Gallagher. But like Kafka's Hunger Artist, Morse, became a guitar hero as the age of guitar heroes was vanishing. Despite the total failure of the Dixie Dregs, then the Dregs and then The Steve Morse Band to sell records, Morse's reputation was such, that when in 1984, Morse decided to go solo, he was the subject of a bidding war won by Elektra. Yet, by the end of that decade, Morse was not a solo star: He was instead working as a commercial airline pilot and doing time in the soft rock group Kansas (commercial work of another sort).
The 90's were even less a time for guitar heroes than the 80's had been. In 1996, the biography on Morse's entry in the AllMusic ends abruptly with him taking a European tour working in Deep Purple. Ritchie Blackmore had quit the band, and Deep Purple needed someone with the technical skills to replace him. If AllMusic updates the Morse entry one day soon there won't be much to add. As of 2007, Morse remains in Deep Purple, the otherwise British metal band. So, this weekend, at the Hard Rock, I watched, Morse, as he has for more than a decade, the greatest guitar player of the 80's, step up to play the parts of Ritchie Blackmore, the guitar star of the 70's.
In fact, Morse has now been in Deep Purple, consistently, longer than Ritchie Blackmore ever was. But to the old fans, Morse is just some kid (Morse is over 50, but looks much younger, especially when standing next to the living remains of original Deep Purple members like Roger Glover), playing at Ritchie Blackmore.
One fan next to me wondered if it was really worth seeing Deep Purple without Blackmore? Maybe to answer this question, early in the show, Deep Purple singer Ian Gillian introduced Morse to the crowd. Morse performed an impossibly musical and complex solo spot. It was the sort of solo that gets you to the top of guitar magazine polls. I asked the guy what he thought? He put his beer down, looked at me, and started to air guitar the riff he was there to hear, Ritchie Blackmore's riff, you know the one. It can't be easy to be Steve Morse, a virtuoso, spending a decade entertaining guys like this who only want the simple riff to "Smoke on the Water."
Of course, I call it simple, but I can't play that riff either.