15 All-Time Greatest Guest Appearances by Guitarists

How awesome is it when a big name guitarist shows up on somebody else’s song? It’s a fun thrill to recognise somebody’s signature style appearing where you’d not expect it. The obvious one for most of us is of course Eddie Van Halen demonstrating what he did best on Michael Jackson’s Beat It, right?

 We all know that one, but there are many more examples of these guest appearances out there. Today, I’ve herded together a tough street gang’s worth of examples for you to check out and enjoy, including Ed’s immortal Beat It solo. These cuts are coming from all angles, and some are better known than others. Check them out, read the backstories and think about just what an expressive instrument the guitar is!

On one hand, session ace Steve Lukather must’ve been a little bit put out when he’d completed all of the rhythm guitar parts on MJ’s Beat It, only to learn that somebody else was getting drafted in to play the solo. It’s the way of the session world, but Lukather is a top-drawer player. Must’ve stung.

Until he learned that it was Van Halen’s supersonic hotshot guitarist Eddie Van Halen who’d be taking the glory, that is! It’s okay for anybody to come second place to Ed. Actually, it still makes you one of the best players in the world! 

Reportedly, EVH hammered out two improvised solos before beating it (sorry) and refused to take a dime for the trouble. VH frontman ‘Diamond’ David Lee Roth apparently wasn’t happy about Eddie freely sharing his band’s secret weapon with Jackson, which is understandable. Didn’t exactly do either party much harm though, did it?

Here’s another one you probably know already. Derek & The Dominoes - otherwise known as Eric Clapton, basically - made one album and scored big with their epic blues rock hit Layla. A cracking tune with an even better guitar melody, Layla is really the only song we know by this band, and it’s thanks to Clapton’s soaring riff.

Except it isn’t, of course. Clapton didn’t play his own most famous guitar part! The real player? Step forward Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers, one of the finest slide players ever as well as the true author of the Layla riff.

Ol’ Slowhand may not be responsible for the Layla riff (to be fair, he’s never actually pretended to have written it), but he is responsible for one of the greatest solos on a Beatles record.

This classic from the White album is a George Harrison composition, and was reportedly written whilst using the ancient I Ching system to affect a sort of creative randomness. Eric was a friend and previous collaborator of Beatle George’s, and agreed to overdub the solo for the song, transforming it from very good into great. Interestingly, Clapton was not formally credited on the album!

Legend has it that Tom Waits and Keith Richards - two of the most clearly piratical rock stars out there - had long admired each other’s work from afar, but had never worked together. That is, until one day in 1985 when Waits was busy creating his groundbreaking Raindogs album. As the story goes, Waits received a hand-written note that said simply ‘Tom, it’s time. Let’s dance. Keith’, or something to that effect.

No sooner had Waits picked himself up from his (presumably dusty and oily) floor than Richards had arrived at the studio with a brace of guitars and ideas. In the end, he contributed to three tracks on the album (Big Black Mariah, Union Square and Blind Love) and has appeared on several subsequent Waits records.

Bowie’s another chap who knew a great guitarist when he heard one. In fact, we'll be hearing more about that in a second, but first, it’s the slightly improbable collaboration of the ex-Ziggy Stardust with Stevie Ray Vaughan that is worth mentioning! Let’s Dance was one of David’s biggest hit singles of the 80s (with a fairly crazy video, which you should definitely watch, below), and the album also contained the megahit China Girl.

So, on the song, you’ll hear SRV on the guitar solos (it's unmistakably him) and for the cool rhythm parts? None other than Nile Rodgers, who produced the record with Bowie.

Talk about hit machines?!

I said we’d check out another Bowie six-string collaborator, and I suppose you don’t get a more opposite guitarist to Stevie Ray Vaughan than Robert Fripp!

Fripp added his angular, crackling guitars to a handful of the tracks on Heroes (okay, “Heroes?” for the Bowie fanatics), and returned three years later to contribute to Scary Monsters. 

It’s Heroes’ title track that’s by far the most celebrated, though. It’s one of those simple guitar parts that every subsequent guitarist who plays it never seems to nail, though, and it might be because of the peculiar way in which it was captured. There’s no E-Bow and definitely no Sustainer/Sustainiac (no such device existed in 1977): what there is is three tracks of Fripp’s Les Paul DI’d into the studio monitors and played back loud enough to entice a feedback loop. This was recorded one track at a time (obviously) and a composite made on the fly by adjusting faders upon playback. It’s mostly two notes and it’s entirely amazing.

Oscar-winning Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer is well-known for taking unusual routes to his musical goals, and in some ways that might have started off back in 2010 with his music for Inception. Slowed-down samples of Edith Piaf’s music are a pretty creative way to get going, but more inspiration came by bringing in ex-Smiths guitar ace Johnny Marr. His clean-ish electric guitar parts brought sparkle to the ominous synth/orchestra/brass combination, and, I suspect, an ever-so-slight nod towards John Barry’s James Bond music.

This is an interesting one. Who do you get for a guest when you are a freakishly technical metal-adjacent band who play flowery scales on a 7 string? 

Who indeed? How about the only man on earth more capable of freakishly technical, metal-adjacent, flowery 7-string guitar playing? In the best possible way, of course. It’s guitar legend Steve Vai, who both fits right in as if Polyphia is his band, and also shows them young whippersnappers a thing or two about soulful melody-playing. And absolutely tons of shredding.

Here’s a bunch of names for you. Rick Rubin got Jane’s Addiction/Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro to play on Johnny Cash’s cover of Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage.

Did you get all that? I tell you what: everybody makes noise for Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt - and rightly so - but for me, this swaggering, stomping take on the Badmotorfinger banger is the unsung hero.

That change that occurs half way through the song is nothing short of inspired! If you’ve heard this one already, here it is again. If you haven’t, then you are in for a treat.

It’s a well known thing that Pink Floyd hero David Gilmour is the guy who discovered musical genius Kate Bush (cheers Dave!). It’s slightly less remarked upon, though, that he continued to show up for her and contribute his breathless, soaring guitar parts to a number of her songs over the years.

The one that always comes to mind first for me is Rocket’s Tail, from Kate’s 1989 album The Sensual World. This remarkable composition features the Trio Bulgarka singing an a cappella backing to Bush’s lead vocal for much of the song, before the band explodes in with Gilmour’s solo. The inspiration here was ‘fireworks’, and our man Dave does not let us down in that regard. How often do you even hear a song like this? Remarkable.

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was one of the most gigantic records of the mid-90s. She was absolutely everywhere, and it was all down to songs like this one. If you’ve seen the video, then you’ll have seen an entirely different band playing with her out in the desert, but just listen to that bassline and there’s no mistaking the musician.

Flea was joined by his then-Chilis compatriots Chad Smith and Dave Navarro. No room for Anthony in there? Oh well.

When Jon Bon Jovi (real name: Jon Bon Jovi, though spelled differently) was tasked with writing songs for brat-pack western sequel Young Guns II, he quickly got on the blower to his pal Jeff for some guitar magic. Blaze of Glory is a suitably righteous anthem for this early 90s take on Billy the Kid, and all the song needed was a cool guitar solo. Maybe a slide solo, to make it a bit more dusty and Texan?

Sure thing, thought guitar genius Jeff Beck, who performed the slide solo sans slide, opting instead to mimic the sound of a bottleneck with only his Stratocaster’s whammy bar. Amazingly, there’s no slide anywhere near that song at all. You’ll be able to notice that now that I just told you, but if I hadn’t said…

When it came to making what is possibly Queen’s most overtly, deliberately grandiose song, even Freddie Mercury needed to call in a favour. Despite having Brian May - one of the world’s best rock players - in the band, Mercury still felt stumped for what to do in the middle of the track, and so got in his old pal Steve Howe from prog megastars Yes to come up with something.

As you may already understand, Steve Howe is no 12-bar bluesman. His contribution to Innuendo is the solo over the slightly Iberian-sounding section in the middle, already written by Mercury. The almost flamenco piece uses the exotic Phrygian Dominant mode to offer an exotic feel, and Howe landed the session quite by chance. After bumping into the band and having lunch with them, they let him hear the tune and asked him on the spot to add something ‘over the top’. Rather excellently, he is credited on the record as “Additional Wandering Minstrel Spanish Guitar - Somewhere In The Middle - by Steve Howe”.

The Fleetwood Mac guy? On a NIN album? Yes indeed, and on more than one song, too. Back in 2014, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were secretly cooking up the ‘somewhat sequel’ to Reznor’s 1994 opus The Downward Spiral, and brought in several additional musicians for session work. Returning guitarist Adrian Belew played on most songs and bassist extraordinaire Pino Palladino contributed to 4 tracks as well as some live performances.

And yes, Fleetwood Mac’s resident male smoothie Lindsay Buckingham brought his own celebrated fingerstyle chops to three tracks, including the single Copy Of A. Some moments of his are more obvious than others, but this special run through below sees our man going for it against the full synth arsenal of which NIN are renowned.