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The first time I saw her perform — she must’ve been 15, maybe 14 — she got up in a club in Dallas, sat in with her guitar teacher’s band, played "The Wind Cries Mary" and just blew everybody away. ... At that time she was very shy and diminutive, except when you listened to her guitar playing. ... She’s physically a very intense player. She takes a kind of ferocious approach to the technique of the guitar, a real high energy.
--
Tuck Andress, as quoted in "Friendly, and Just a Bit Creepy: St. Vincent Defies Categories" in The New York Times (7 May 2005)

 

St. Vincent (musician)

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That night at the "Eagle's Nest", I remember, he was playing a D-18 Martin acoustic guitar and he was dressed in the latest teen fashion, but the thing I really noticed though, was his guitar playing. Elvis was a fabulous rhythm player. He'd start into "That’s All Right" , with his own guitar, alone, and you didn't want to hear anything else.

 

Elvis Presley

 

When I was a kid, my parents got me into piano, viola, and trombone. They were the three instruments I went through. The moment I started playing trombone, which was the last one before guitar, I knew I wanted to play guitar really badly. I was a huge Metallica fan, and I’m really into Slash. I’ve always thought he was the coolest dude, and like the greatest guitar player. He’s awesome, and I love the fact that he did everything himself. He made the world of guitar fit around him, rather than him fitting around the world of guitar, which I think is really cool.

 

Joe Trohman

 

What interested me about Chuck Berry was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with such ease, throwing in a nice, simple riff, and then drop straight into the feel of it again. We used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We'd do away with the differences between lead and rhythm guitar. You can't go into a shop and ask for a "lead guitar". You're a guitar player, and you play a guitar.

 

Keith Richards

 

I've always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words. That's born out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players -- I'm interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. I don't like to waste notes, not even one. Who was it that said, "The reason why all those guitar players play so many notes is because they can't find the right one"? I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really like Nils Lofgren's soloing, because he's so melodic. I love John Lennon's rhythm playing, and George Harrison was an incredible guitarist.
There's a lot of guitar culture that I don't like at all. I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don't think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing Spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise. Being a soloist who wants to just display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don't think there's any room for it in pop music. It's the last stand of late-'60s/early-'70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.

 

Johnny Marr

 

"He was an extraordinary bloke. First of all he was very funny. He was straight but very camp. [He] came in and Visconte said, ‘Right, what are we doing?’. He said: ‘Well I haven’t got any material, I’ve just got one guitar riff’. So he played us this guitar riff. It sounded a bit like Chuck Berry to me but I didn’t say anything. He went out with the band and after two hours he said, ‘Right, got a song’. So we recorded it and took a few takes. He then said, ‘Right I’ve got a bit of a tune, just give me half an hour’. In 10 minutes he came back and said, ‘Right I’ve got the lyrics and got the tune’. So he’d written Get It On in 10 minutes basically. He went out there, sang it and in four or five takes we’d got it. There it was. The guy was absolutely astonishing."

 

Martin Rushent