When Tom Morello, the spectacularly adept guitarist for the politically minded punk/metal/rap band Rage Against the Machine, is asked to name his favorite guitar player, his answer is intriguingly atypical. He doesn't name Led Zeppelin's much copied Jimmy Page, though he does allow that Page's "mysterious, unsavory" guitar solos made him think, when he was young, that he too could "channel mysterious, unsavory things into suburban Illinois through my guitar." And he doesn't name Jimi Hendrix, though when Morello was a student at Harvard in the mid-1980s (major: social studies), he sported an impressively expansive Hendrix-style Afro.
In fact, there are...