Top 5 Slide Guitar Songs

I’ve always been intrigued by the slide guitar. For those not in the know, it’s just a metal or glass tube that fits over the ring finger or pinkie of your fretting hand. It has a characteristic sound when you slide it up and down the fretboard, especially with a fair amount of distortion and other effects thrown on top of it. There’s a whole genre of blues that relies heavily on the slide guitar, old black blues guys smoking pipes and drinking bourbon in pool halls, but I could never get into them. My tastes ran more popular, mostly 70s white bands that ripped those old blues guys off.

Though I never played slide live or on any demo tapes, I always fiddled around with one in the privacy of my apartment. During the summer of 1993 I made a couple of tapes on a Tascam 4-track recording device that featured heavy use of slide. My favorite open tuning was C, and I experimented with clean, Stratocaster sounds, heavily distorted Les Paul sounds, wah-wah pedals, delay, echo, you name it. Nothing ever came out of it as far as writing songs for my band or copyrighting stuff, but it was fun. I still have the tapes.

Anyway, here’s my list:


Life of Illusion by Joe Walsh. Since I recently got this CD for my birthday this is probably why slide guitar’s been on my brain. Walsh has a very distinct, very unique sound that relies often on slide guitar use, more on his solo stuff than his stuff with the Eagles. This solo brings a frenetic coolness to a goofy tongue-in-cheek song that I can listen to over and over.

Making Memories by Rush. These guys were my college band! I listened so much 70s Rush in the mid-eighties I started speaking with a Canadian accent. No. But I’ve heard it said that these guys are the whitest guys in rock-n-roll, and I agree. Alex Lifeson is a phenomenal guitarist who does everything right – his own distinct signature sound, super-creative writing, no technique or style he can’t get down. But I only recall one Rush song having a slide guitar solo in it, and it’s this one. Short and very sweet, heavily distorted over multitracked acoustic guitars and a melodic base, this one’s nice.

Moonlight Drive by the Doors. Robby Krieger’s jaunty little solo here is the perfect compliment to Manzarek’s crisp keyboards and thudding bass and Morrison’s almost-in-tune warblings. He’s got full command of that there slide thingie, playful, funny, and climactic all at the right places.

In My Time of Dying by Led Zeppelin. I’ve said it before and I will go on saying it: Jimmy Page is the coolest guitarist ever. Even though he may have used a slide here and there on earlier stuff, he seemed to get into it for Physical Graffiti. I don’t know if it’s me or not, but I think Page likes to disguise that he’s using a slide, or else all the effects he throws on it does. But this song was written for the fullest utilization of slide and the tone, the aggression, the frantic headlong soloing make it quite cool.

Drowse by Queen. I think Brian May falls into a similar category as Page in this regard. There’s a lot of slide guitar work on some of Queen’s magnum opuses (opi?) but they’re usually buried under pounds of overdubs or elsewise disguised. Drowse, though, is pretty obvious. Though necessarily a bit plodding, it works. You could also take Tie Your Mother Down, a more conventional rock piece, as a good example of slide, too.

Disclaimer: I’m sure that there are lots of songs and such that I’ve forgotten, and there may be more than a few inaccuracies in the previous musings. I am going on memory, some decades old. I had a box of approximately 240 CDs stolen from my apartment around the summer of 2002, including all my Zeppelin, Queen, most of my Rush, and lots more modern and eclectic stuff. So a lot of these songs haven’t been heard since then.

But I enjoyed this little post.