Great Guitar Solo #3: Four-Second Eternity

One of pop music's most captivating moments ever, courtesy of a master who has given us more than his share. (Note: he is not John Hiatt.)

A few weeks ago, in the first installment of my series on the three rock guitar solos at the top of my personal pantheon, I wrote about the mere 37 seconds in which the Band’s Robbie Robertson “reached his guitar apotheosis,” as I put it, in the group’s song “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”. If Robbie’s “King Harvest” solo is short, my third and final choice is really short. In fact, it’s one note (two, to be pedantically precise). It lodged itself in my mind the first time I heard it, almost 40 years ago, and hasn’t budged since. Just the other day, researching this piece, I discovered that the music writer Michael Elliott considers this solo, or piece of a solo, “one of the most arresting moments in pop music.” It could never have been played by any other guitarist than an individual whom I’ve written about extensively, on Substack and elsewhere. The great ones have a way of popping up time and again, insisting on inserting themselves into the conversation.

By February 1987, when he recorded his breakthrough album, Bring the Family, John Hiatt had made seven records, none of which dented Billboard’s Top 200. Commercial flop or not, Hiatt’s talent as a singer/songwriter was obvious to some of the sharpest ears in pop music: Ry Cooder, for instance, who admired Hiatt’s singing and considered him “a ripping great guitarist” as well, hiring Hiatt to play rhythm guitar on several of Cooder’s early-1980s tours. Hiatt’s song “The Way We Make a Broken Heart” is on Cooder’s 1980 album Borderline and was a #1 hit for Rosanne Cash on Billboard’s country-music chart in 1987.

Hiatt’s failure as a solo artist was traceable to a single, overriding cause: he was, and had been since his early teens, a confirmed alcoholic and drug abuser. If most of his songs had a witty but ultimately unsatisfying sheen and his albums bounced from genre to genre, it was because he was loath to probe his inner life too deeply. He hated what he saw there.

In the summer of 1984, Hiatt vowed to stay sober, and did. He married a fellow recovering alcoholic in June 1986, and stuck with her, too. (His previous two marriages had failed, his second wife a suicide).

Rebuilding his life from the inside out, Hiatt finally found his voice. He wrote and sang, as his biographer puts it, “about domesticity [Hiatt and his new wife each had a child; when they married, they had a family on their hands], about resilience, about overcoming one’s demons and not only surviving but learning how to thrive. These were songs… whose emotions came from somewhere deeper than cynicism: they came straight from his heart.”

“I’m 34 years old now/And I’ve come to you/Baby I don’t know how/I ever got through,” Hiatt sings in one of Bring the Family’s signature songs, “Learning How to Love You.” In the quietly triumphant “Stood Up,” he tells us, “Now they give last call for alcohol/And no one has to carry me home/You see, I only work here now/My drinking days are long gone.”

By the time he had enough new songs for an album, Hiatt found that he had burned so many bridges that no American label would sign him. (As he put it, “I had destroyed practically every aspect of my business career.”) But the British label Demon, co-owned by Jake Riviera, who managed Hiatt’s admirers Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, was game, and advanced Hiatt $30,000: enough for four days, period, of studio time at Los Angeles’s Ocean Way Studios. John Chelew, another Hiatt fan, whose day job was booking acts at the Santa Monica music club McCabe’s Guitar Shop, was happy to produce. It had been Chelew’s idea, in fact, to package Hiatt’s new brace of songs as an album. If this story has a secret hero, it is John Chelew.

To Hiatt’s surprise, his dream team of a studio band—Cooder, drummer Jim Keltner and Lowe (better known for producing Costello’s first five albums than as an excellent bass guitarist)—all signed on. (The famously cantankerous Cooder agreed to come for one day and stay if he liked the vibe. “I said that?” Cooder later laughed. “Now, that wasn’t very nice.”) Lowe was so eager to join the team that he waived his fee. Cooder and Keltner, Angelenos, went home at night; Hiatt and Lowe shared a room in a seedy San Fernando Valley hotel.

With his 1987 album Bring the Family, John Hiatt resurrected his career. To the all-but-washed-up singer/songwriter’s amazement, three of pop music’s finest musicians were eager to accompany him: drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Nick Lowe, and Ry Cooder, one of rock’s greatest-ever guitar players. Cooder is responsible for the transcendant moment (1:55 to 1:59 of “Lipstick Sunset”) that this article is about.

Whaddya know, a four-day masterpiece. “Memphis in the Meantime,” goosed along by the masterful Keltner’s funky syncopation, was an ideally inviting album opener. “Have a Little Faith in Me” has become a contemporary standard, covered by countless artists, including Dolly Parton, the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Jewel, Jon Bon Jovi and Chaka Khan. “If I had a nickel for every time a couple told me they’d had the song played at their wedding,” Hiatt once said, “I could retire a wealthy man.” Bonnie Raitt turned “Thing Called Love” into a huge MTV hit that introduced listeners to Raitt’s career-changing 1989 album Nick of Time. In the stark, emotionally naked “Tip of My Tongue,” Hiatt accepted his share of responsibility for his second wife’s suicide.

Behind its somewhat opaque lyrics, “Lipstick Sunset” also strikes me as an account of the second marriage’s failure. But what is most notable about “Lipstick Sunset,” what will bring listeners back to the song for decades (it already has), is Ry Cooder’s unforgettable solo. Largely on the basis of a single, extraordinary note, Cooder’s “Lipstick Sunset” solo (he plays two on the song; the first is the one under discussion) is one of the most memorable of Cooder’s career. Which is saying a lot.

“Lipstick Sunset” is a ballad of slow-to-medium tempo, not intended for high-volume listening. It lasts for 4:13. It has five choruses, sixteen measures each. Cooder, as is his career-long practice, wears a slide (his are almost always glass) on his pinkie. Lots of slide guitarists wear the slide on another finger; Cooder uses his pinkie to free up his other three fingers to work the fretboard.

On the first chorus, all we hear is Hiatt’s voice and acoustic guitar and Keltner’s whisper of a drum part. On the second chorus, Cooder and Lowe join in. Cooder’s guitar could hardly be less intrusive; for much of the chorus, he holds each note for two bars. For a few seconds at the end of the chorus, Cooder’s guitar playfully harmonizes with Hiatt’s vocal.

Chorus 3 belongs to Cooder. As Keltner hits his snare drum for the first time, Cooder picks up the pace, if hardly dramatically, taking only one bar, not two, to let a note unfurl. It’s just after the start of the ninth bar (1:55) that the magic strikes, when Cooder introduces a note that, while not much longer than those he’s been playing, seems to last forever as he slides from A above middle C to F sharp. It’s an ascent of only six-and-a-half steps, but its languor, the patience of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing, who will not be hurried, creates the illusion that Cooder is leaping three octaves, not less than one. At the end of his jump, which has taken three-and-a-half seconds, he nudges his slide a half-step up, to G, slipping in a quick little eighth-note, and the moment, a grand total of four seconds and seven steps, is over. Cooder plays the solo’s final six measures with authority, if not with the magnificence of what preceded them, Hiatt re-enters to sing his final verse, and Cooder ends the song with a second, casually virtuosic, solo, as if to offhandedly reassert his greatness.

Over the years, I’ve had dozens of people listen to Cooder’s lick, and it invariably leaves them shaking their heads at its exhilarating upsweep. “I got lucky that time,” Cooder once said about his “Lipstick Sunset” moment. “I didn’t overplay. Those days, if I got excited, I’d play too hard and too much, and I had to get cured of that. But on that one, my nervous system was in good form, and I didn’t overdo it.”

John Chelew played the ten songs, which Hiatt had collectively named Bring the Family (an invitation to potential listeners that’s so understated I didn’t grasp its meaning until I Googled the title a few days ago), for executives at A&M Records, who happily bought the record from Demon, signed Hiatt to what became a five-album tenure, and laid out the money for a tour.

Bring the Family was Hiatt’s first album to crack the Top 200, hitting #107: unspectacular but entirely respectable for an artist treasured, for the length of his career—he’s still out here—by an audience whose size was never going to rival that of a chart-topping celebrity (Hiatt’s bestselling album, 2012’s Mystic Pinball, peaked at #39.)

The band that Hiatt picked for the Bring the Family tour, which stayed with him to cut his next album, Slow Turning, was first-rate: the Louisianian Sonny Landreth, one of the few slide guitarists capable of playing within shouting distance of Cooder; the exceptional, loose-limbed drummer Kenneth Blevins, and bassist Dave Ranson. Hiatt, who had not, and never would, lose his sardonic edge, named his band The Goners.

The first leg of the tour, from August 19 to October 27 (we’re still in 1987), took Hiatt and the band from Boulder, CO to Ritz, Austria and back to L.A., where they played a show for an audience largely of industry insiders.

“Just before we walk out onstage,” Landreth recalled, “John goes, ‘Oh, by the way, I understand Mr. Cooder and Mr. Keltner are in the audience tonight.’ I said, ‘You might have told me sooner!’ But maybe he did me a favor. I couldn’t think about it too much.

Hiatt and the Goners’ take on “Lipstick Sunset” on October 9, 1987. Sonny Landreth, one of America’s best slide players not named Cooder, admitted to being terrified at the prospect of playing Cooder’s magisterial “Lipstick Sunset” solo. How did Landreth acquit himself? You be the judge.

“I was okay until ‘Lipstick Sunset,’ Landreth continued. “So we’re getting into the song, and I think, ‘Okay, Ry’s out there, just don’t think about it. Do your thing.’” As it happened, not only did the song belong to Cooder; so had the guitar that Landreth was playing. “I realized that I was playing a Fender Strat that used to be Ry’s, that he’d given to John. So here I am, playing ‘Lipstick Sunset’ and Ry’s iconic solo, just one of the greatest things you’ve ever heard in your life, and he’s in the audience. I don’t know what kind of job I did, but after that I was fine.” As the above video, taken earlier on the tour, shows, Landreth was certainly capable of a credible “Lipstick Sunset” solo (retaining Cooder’s marvelous upwards slide, perhaps out of respect for the originator, perhaps because Sonny could think of nothing that sounded so perfect), but the difference between a working professional and a demigod are here and above for the hearing.

I doubt that Cooder himself has ever matched the moment he pulled off during that Bring the Family session, when his nervous system was in good form.

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1 “…one of the most arresting moments in pop music” is from Michael Elliott’s Have a Little Faith: The John Hiatt Story, Chicago Review Press, 2021.

2 Choice #2, as you can see by glancing at “Among the Musical”’s Chapter 66 (February 9), is the second of the two solos that Eric Clapton plays on Cream’s live version of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.” Clapton’s “Crossroads” (the only one of my three choices that’s more than a minute long, barely) is on the 1968 Cream album Wheels of Fire.