Has anyone ever studied his technique? He mixes picking styles and kind of flows between them. When he plays fast, however, it’s clear that he modeled George Benson. Interesting and great player who you don’t hear about often. Was just curious if anyone had taken an interest in his playing.
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Yeah, definitely had in impact on me when LC hit the scene-his solo on Cult of Personaity wasn’t something you would normaly hear on mtv, was it? I loved-and still do-his attidude and open approach to harmony when he improvises. I also remember him mention in some interview Joe Diorio’s Intervalic Designs and how it influenced his playing-so I got it too.(Man, just hit me that Cult of Personality was featured in those Guitar Player soundpages-anyone remember those?)
What I certainly picked from him at the time was his liberal use of whole tone and diminished scales-and also tried to match his speed. In my ears the whole thing sounded like Trane and Dolphy, albeit in a song context. Yup, love it.
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Yes, the V-man and Living Color were a big part of my formative years. We used to play a few Living Color songs, like Middleman.
Interestingly enough, I never analysed Vernon’s technique that much. To sound like Vernon Reid, the younger me concluded: “Play any notes, it doesn’t matter, just play them as fast as you can”.
I guess that was my uninformed verbalisation of his use of whole tone and diminished scale notes. And I knew he was influenced by jazz players, so the fast as you can part was Coltrane et al. 
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I remember reading old GP issues where Reid would talk about the influence Arthur Rhames – a brilliant Brooklyn musician that was equally terrifying on sax, piano, and guitar, but who died young and was not really recorded that well.
In recent years, bootleg recordings have popped up and… yeah, they’re pretty terrifying:
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That’s like Eddie Hazel meets Ornette Coleman.
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Wow. Very unique style. Assuming they never met, there is a spirit connection between Rhames and Holdsworth. I had never heard of him.
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He looks like a benson style dwps. You can see in his cult of personality lesson
I’m on a facebook forum of weirdo guitarists who discuss under the radar guys like Rhames and Lane and other people like Reid.
Rhames was yet another musician who had debilitating health issues (he contracted HIV and later AIDS in an age where that illness was still an unknown killer of young gays and bisexuals in the early to mid 1980s) and like a lot of musicians had no health insurance, and his passing was a real loss to the musical community. Not many people can shred like that on guitar, play sax like John Coltrane and play piano like McCoy Tyner. The closest comparison I can think of would be someone like Shawn Lane who was a talented multi-instrumentalist as well as guitar phenomenon. And we’re lucky in the case of Shawn Lane because we have lots of videos and recordings, Rhames recordings are somewhat available (I know of several jazz recordings of him on sax and piano) but his high powered guitar playing on video is really rare especially on recordings. And I described his left hand while playing (at the same weirdo guitarist facebook forum) as being similar to “watching underwater sea plants in motion but sped up” …
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That’s pretty out there. When was that recorded?