Learning songs is the best way to master the guitar. You develop techniques as you go, expanding your musical vocabulary. When it’s time to play your first concerts, there will inevitably be a cover or two.
But some tracks are best left in the practice space. Maybe they've been overplayed. They could be incredibly difficult to pull off. Or maybe they're simply untouchable. Either way, for guitarists, these are the uncoverable…
1. The Killers – Mr. Brightside
The anthem of student nightclubs, its appeal juiced by cheap hooch, Mr. Brightside is big, dumb fun – but perform it at your peril. It’s one of the hardest songs to play clean. Most will fall off the fretboard during the twisty chords and relentless picking of the opening riff. And if you make it through that, the five-fret stretch on the G6 chord in the pre-chorus will get you – guaranteed!
2. Michael Jackson – Beat It
At first, this was in the list because the guitar solo is untouchable, a peerless cameo from an Eddie Van Halen at the peak of his powers. Inviting rock’s greatest player onboard with the King of Pop was an act of cultural alchemy. But even if you managed to nail the notes, what about the tone? And if you finally get that down, the Variac glowing beetroot red, who’s going to sing it?
3. Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven
With Gibson launching a replica of Jimmy Page’s EDS-1275, we wonder whether the moratorium on Stairway… was lifted in guitar stores worldwide so the public can try it out. But no matter the context, avoid performing this in public.
Heart pulled it off. But that’s Heart. If anyone else tries this celestial epic, well, they’ll think your stairway doesn’t reach all the way to heaven.
4. AC/DC – Thunderstruck
There are good reasons to play Thunderstruck live. It would raise the dead. But this is a high-risk cover. The intro, with its 16th-note, single-string arpeggios – all alternate picking – is a killer. It may be the ultimate exercise. Do try this at home. In front of an audience? You’re brave. Or foolish.
5. Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’
Jonathan Cain’s work on the keys gives Neal Schon plenty of time to bail on Journey’s most platinum-tinned über hit but also to steel himself for some dawn-of-the-’80s lead virtuosity. It’d take a miracle to perform this. And besides, urban legend says that if you play this correctly, your life cuts to black and you’ll never know what happens next.
6. Metallica – Master of Puppets
Unless a good friend has been detained in the netherworld and the only hope of rescue rests upon perfectly executing the solo for the edification of Lovecraftian fauna, Master of Puppets is the cover that should not be. If only for health reasons: eight-and-a-half minutes of those downstrokes will give you Carpal tunnel.
7. Prince – Purple Rain
You have got to hand it to anyone with the audacity to believe they are blessed one scintilla of the Purple One’s animal magnetism and decide that, yes, they will take to the stage in a ruff and perform his signature power ballad, the ür-track of the ’80s.
It’s another big song; there’s a lotta music here, with a solo that’s phrased like a meteor storm, and a run of Wendy Melvoin-voiced chords in the intro whose stretch makes them best suited to polydactylous guitarists.
8. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Like Smoke On The Water, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Enter Sandman and the likes, Seven Nation Army is one of those pop-cultural touchstones that is all but untouchable, even though it is a cinch to play.
It has become a football chant, a walk-on anthem for professional wrestling and other bloodsports, all on the power of a riff that is as evolutionarily advanced as homo neanderthalensis. What are you going to add to it?
9. Frank Zappa – Inca Roads
There are easier things in life to do. You could draw a map of Paris by hand, build a 1:1 scale replica of the Burj Khalifa using herring bones and Silly Putty. Heck, Inca Roads is so complicated that not even Frank Zappa himself could play it live – at least, not as it was recorded – and such is its bewildering arrangements, the see-sawing modulation of time signatures, that initial pressings of the LP skipped and no-one even noticed.
10. Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
BoRhap should be many things. It should be the UK national anthem. It should supplant Léo Delibes’ Flower Duet from Lakmé as the music on British Airlines flights. It should be required study for any budding rock guitarist, on account of it featuring one of rock’s greatest riffs, one of its stateliest solos.
But it should not be on your setlist, not unless you’ve got a generational talent fronting the band on a ’72 Steinway, and you’re playing Wembley. Then? Well, by all means.
