What Happened to the Guitar Soloist? Has Music Died?

I've been doing some thinking lately. When is the last time in the past decade that I heard a guitar solo that actually had me humming it later? Sadly, I can't recall one, at least not since hearing Clapton's remake of After Midnight back around the early 1990s. I'm talking about the kind of guitar solo that you recognize after a bar or two because it's so distinctive. Eric Clapton's Cocaine, Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), Brian May's Bohemian Rhapsody, David Gilmour's Comfortably Numb, Jimmy Page's Communication Breakdown; that's the kind of solo I'm talking about. When you hear the intro to the guitar solo in Hotel California by the Eagles, you damn well know which song it is and how the rest of that solo is supposed to sound.

Mind you, I realize which generation of musicians I just reeled off. I'm not lamenting the fact that it's no longer the seventies. There were great rock guitarists in the fifties, in the sixties, in the seventies, and arguably into the eighties. Each generation influenced the succeeding one, which then influenced the next, and so on. Somewhere along the way, however, the guitar gods that defined at least 30 years of rock music faded one by one from the mainstream scene, and no one has yet come to replace them in my opinion.

Talkin' About My Generation: 1965 - 1985
Let's just look at the guitar players that rose to fame during this time frame. In most of these cases, you knew the guitar player by name as well as sound. Granted, there was a tendency to elevate the lead guitarist in such a way that led to extended 20-minute solos, but as much as I felt that it was grandstanding at the time, I'd almost kill to hear a guitar player with the stones to try that in today's market. Below are some of the greatest guitar legends of this time; it's by no means exhaustive, and I know everyone has their pet favorite, but I think we can all agree that the players listed deserve recognition: