10 Greatest Rhythm Guitarists In Rock History

There's a good case to be made when people call the Beatles the world's first boy band. They were all the same type of pinup guys that girls went nuts for, and a lot of their early songs had the same trope of dealing with love and everything that goes with it. Once you got over the moptop haircuts and the screaming though, everyone in this band could really play.

You wouldn't know it if you had asked John Lennon though, since he was always talking down his ability to even play guitar. In interviews, Lennon would normally talk about how he wasn't sure what he was doing on the guitar half the time, always having trouble trying to translate what he wanted. Through his limited musical vocabulary though, John made the band surge with energy without even knowing it.

As the band got more experimental, songs like Good Morning Good Morning live and die on his harsh rhythmic accents, with the whole band playing with different time signatures at will. In the midst of the more polished pop songs, Lennon was also keen to play with your expectations, taking chords that weren't in the traditional framework of the tune and somehow making the whole thing feel seamless. He may not have thought he had the best timing, but he had the best sense of his own timing. So when everyone calls George Harrison the great guitarist who occasionally sings, John is the forceful singer who can casually throw a curveball when he picks up the six string.