It doesn’t take much to get Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, to riff about guitar solos. She vividly remembers the first one she learned (Pearl Jam’s “Alive”). Now, 20 years into her career, she’s slinging licks like nobody’s business, displayed most recently in the form of Live in London!, her just-released orchestral recording documenting a BBC Royal Albert Hall concert (see: the ascending “Black Rainbow,” and the dissonant “Live in the Dream,” on which she channels David Gilmour with fangs). But the best guitar solo? “Kid Charlemagne,” Clark tells Rolling Stone.
The 1976 Steely Dan classic, which lands at Number 8 on Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest guitar solos of all time, opens the album The Royal Scam at a radio-friendly four minutes and 38 seconds (edited down to just under four for the single version), nearly a quarter of which are helmed by guitarist Larry Carlton. (St. Vincent’s own “Rattlesnake” also appears on our greatest guitar solos list.)
It’s been said that it took some two hours in the studio with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to work on the 50-second solo, which, at Becker’s insistence, Carlton had to record several times on a Fender Stratocaster before being allowed to return to his preferred Gibson ES-335. Much of what was recorded ended up on the cutting room floor, but the outro — completely improvised — was done in one take.
“Those guitar solos on The Royal Scam are so iconic that I want to hear them verbatim,” says Clark, who concedes that Steely Dan’s “Peg” (released a year later) is another obvious contender for her guitarist heart. “I don’t want to hear someone improvise and stretch out and be completely extemporaneous — even the great guitar players that they’ve had onstage,” she continues. “I want to hear the Larry Carlton solo note-for-note. That’s the testament to how great it is. It’s sacrosanct, compositionally.”
Clark knows about reinterpretation. Her 19-song Live in London! set, released digitally on March 20, features orchestral arrangements of St. Vincent fan favorites — highlights include the yearning “Los Ageless” and heartbreaker “New York” — led by conductor Jules Buckley and co-produced by Rachel Eckroth. Clark describes the experience as “glorious and civilized. … especially coming from All Born Screaming, which, I would say, was my most violent tour to date — and I definitely have the scars to prove it. Going from that to this, I got to bathe in beauty for two hours onstage.”
Watch the performance below.
