text: In Defense of Clapton's Layla Recently, GuitarWorld magazine published a list of top 100 of the worst guitar solos, riffs and licks of all time. I am a big sucker for this sort of thing, so I swallowed the \$7.95 price to purchase it, with a good expectation of what would be included. Just as literary scholars have a canon of great literature, the guitarist community has a canon of really awful guitar solos - including, for instance, Neil Young's infamous one-note Cinnamon Girl solo, anything by Van Halen, and anything played by Kurt Cobain. When I turned to the list, I suffered a cruel, horrible shock.