Riffology, Charles Edward Anderson Berry and how, contrary to Don's assertion, the music did not die.

MG writes:

I have just watched a BBC programme about the 'story' of the 'riff'.  While it may trace its roots back to  Beethoven's fifth, Wagnerian Leitmotivs and Tchaikovsky's 1812 and through the figures of boogie-woogie piano and 12-bar blues, it owes its beginnings in 'popular' music to the guitar of Johnny B Goode and the awesome talent of one Charles Edward Anderson Berry. Who would have thought that a blending of the 12-bar of T-Bone Waker, the honky-tonk of the singuar Johnnie Clyde Johnson and country music woud herald the dawning of a new age in music? Music that was entirely geared to the aspirations, hopes and preoccupations of white, later black, affluent American, later European, teenagers. Although I came late to Berry, I was only born in 1955 and first ran across him when I was about seven or eight, who could ever forget Johnny B Goode, dedicated to his  long-suffering pianist, the same Johnnie Clyde Johnson, No particular place to go, Maybelline, You can't catch me, Roll over Beethoven; even 1977's My Ding-a-Ling, backed as it was with the live, unexpurgated version of Reelin' and Rockin' not the sanistised Bill Haley version, could not queer the patch of his brilliance.

If there are aliens out there somewhere, I hope that they have a better system of communication than we have. To find that the 'Voyager' Berry track, just about beyond Pluto's orbit despite being launched in 1977, means that it will otherwise take another four or five thousend millennia before they can listen to more; that would just be too hard to contemplate.

Most of the usual suspects were there, all of which appear in my own collection whether on vinyl, CD or a download fron iTunes. Some of more obvious.  Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry and its awesome polar counterpart, Link Wray's The Rumble; a instrumental so menacing, with its overcranked and distorted sound, that it was banned from US radio. Nothing would be heard like it until the birth (or is that the spawning?) of Tony Iommi. Apache by Hank Marvin and the Shadows and its a-few-years-later antithesis, the Kinks You really got me, for which Dave Davies had, perhaps unknowlingly or perhaps not, stolen Link Wray's idea of cutting the speaker cone on the amplifier to get the distortion.

The opening track of Black Sabbath's first LP, which so gobsmacked me the first time I heard it, cranked to 11 on the little record player that we had in our common room in the Sixth Form annexe, that I was prepared to believe the hype about the band's satanic origins. Strangely, the programme then took a minor, or major, diversion into the realms of Robert Fripp and King Crimson. Undoubtedly 21st Century Schizoid Man is a great 'riff' and they showed a glimpse of the 1969 Hyde Park concert in which KC 'blew' the Stones off stage, but King Crimson were never about riffs. Strange phrasing, recursions, variations around a motif, bizarre time signatures every fourth bar, yes;riffs no!

We had the Runaways, with Lita Ford and Joan Jett, with Cherry Bomb and Heart's Barracuda, although no I love rock 'n roll; Nile Rogers and Chic with Freak Out and the hit that spawned hip-hop, Good Times. (I could almost kill Nile for that!) And then, Michael Jackson's assault on MTV; Steve Lukather's awesome riff to Beat It, a video almost as good as Thriller and an Eddie van Halen solo in the middle which, at the time, melted the knobs on your TV.

As synths began to usurp the dominant position in 'lead' instruments and the rock riff got further and further up its own arsehole, when spraying your fingers with WD40 seemed like a good idea, the riff suddenly hit back in Johnny Marr and the Smiths (all jangly like the Byrds), My Bloody Valentine, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth and the Pixies (all apocalyptic by design and often unlistenable to in my opinion) and finally Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, who, with Smells like Teen Spirit, reinvented the sounds of the fifties and sixties and then the seventies for the nineties.

Quite obviously, the producers of the programme turned off about where I did; I thought Nirvana were enormously overhyped. Only the White Stripes got a mention after that. Still, any guitar and drums duo that can get a football crowd to chant the riff to Seven Nation Army has to have something going for it.

Omissions? Well, it all too easy to criticise, especially in a 60 minute programme, but why on earth did they choose Communication Breakdown instead of Whole Lotta Love in which to frame Page's mastery of the riff. No Keith Richard's Satisfaction or Jumpin' Jack Flash; no Spirit in the Sky; nothing from the entire punk era least of all John Ford's Nice legs shame about the face; no Rezillos and Top of the Pops, just a very brief glimpse of the Clash; no Stuart Adamson and Big Country; no Slade or David Bowie (with Mick Ronson, of course); no Metallica, Enter Sandman, at least; not even Pictures of Matchstick Men or Adrian Gurvitz's tour de force, Race with the Devil.

I have perhaps left the best until the very last. Not because they didn't include it because they did, about half way through, but because somewhere in the world at this very moment, someone is trying to play it. Of course it's Smoke on the Water. (Just remember, guys, and gals, it's plucked; they are not power chords.) Just about the one riff any guitar player must be able to play; most I suspect learnt that first in preference to any other if you took up the guitar in the seventies. At once blindingly simple yet nonetheless capable of awesome power. You didn't have to be Joe Satriani, Carlos Santana, Gary Moore or Johnny Winter; if you could master that riff, in the comfort of your bedroom with a Strat copy and a second hand Vox AC30 cranked to 10, you believed you could be a rock star!