10 Most Underrated Guitarists In Rock Music History

Once hair metal started to kick into high gear, the guitar scene was about to be flooded with musicians wanting to be the next Eddie Van Halen. Out of all the bands that occupied the Sunset Strip, most of them were trying to make lightning strike twice, having the same kind of tapping licks or trying to outdo each other by trying to play as fast as humanly possible. Phil Collen may have had a lot of finesse under his belt in Def Leppard, but Steve Clark was a bit of a different story.

Being there at the beginning of the band when most of the members were still in their teens, a lot of Clark's influences tended to focus on the glory days of rock and roll, as much indebted to giants like Jimmy Page as he was with the breakout glam stars like Johnny Thunders and Marc Bolan. While Collen may have been the technician, there's much more humanity in Steve's playing, channeling most of his aggression into his leads and bringing a bit of a punk edge into a lot of their songs.

As the band made their way through albums like Pyromania and Hysteria, Steve was also responsible with some of the best riffs that the band made, like turning his version of the Police's Message in a Bottle into the main riff to Gods of War. The next phase of Leppard after Steve's death may have experimented more with pop and grunge in the '90s, but his style was about as rock and roll as they come.