Five classic songs that started out as jams
The first time the members of Led Zeppelin were all in the same room, they jammed, and they knew they were going to become one of the best bands in the world off the back of it.
“There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door, and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other: ‘What shall we play?’ Me doing more sessions, didn’t know anything at all,” recalled John Paul Jones, “There was an old Yardbirds tune […] called ‘Train Kept a Rollin’… The whole room just exploded.”
There really is something magical about a jam session, as it’s the environment in which a band knows whether they’re going to connect or not, just like with Led Zeppelin. However, those sessions aren’t just for building camaraderie and playing a few improvised notes here and there, as they also often form the foundation for what becomes truly great songs, as riffs, lyrics, solos, and beats are all often the result of a jam session.
No matter what genre you’re talking about, what style of music you’re referring to, there will be great songs buried within it that are nothing but the by-product of a successful jam session.
Five classic tracks that were the result of jams:
Lynyrd Skynyrd – ‘Freebird’
When a lot of kids first pick up a guitar, they do so with the solo to ‘Freebird’ ringing in the back of their head, a guitar work so infectious that everyone becomes immediately intent on trying to recreate it for themselves. It sounds perfect and carefully constructed, a wonderful addition to what is already a great song, made more interesting by the fact that it originally started out as a jam.
The band were playing the track live long before they recorded it, and it came during a moment in the show when singer Ronnie Van Zant needed to take a break and let his vocal cords heal up a little. The band decided the most effective way to do this would be by adding a five-minute jam to the end of ‘Freebird’, which was received well by audiences, and so when it came to actually recording the track, Lynyrd Skynyrd decided they would cement this jam in history.
Nirvana – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
We can sit here and debate what the greatest Nirvana song is all day, but there’s no escaping the fact that the band’s most popular offering is ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. You won’t find a grunge-lover who doesn’t bob their head the moment those first few chords are hit, and you won’t see a list of attributes to rock devoid of this classic, so it’s quite shocking that it all started out as a jam.
“I think everyone was more focused on songs like ‘In Bloom’ or ‘Lithium’ or ‘Breed’; nobody really paid too much attention to ‘Teen Spirit’ while we were recording it. We just thought it was another cool song for the record,” recalled Dave Grohl, as Kurt Cobain merely started strumming out a riff, and then the track was created around it.
“We were listening to a lot of Pixies… we were just having fun,” he added, “Of course, no one had any psychic foresight to imagine that [‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’] would go on to do what it did. We just fuckin’ rocked it in a little rehearsal space that was like a barn.”
Funkadelic – ‘Maggot Brain’
For most of the songs on this list, you’ll be blown away that the track is the result of a jam; however, that can’t be said for ‘Maggot Brain’. You can tell that this song was born out of a jam session, but that doesn’t take away from how amazing the finished product is. It’s a few chords, an elongated run time, and an exceptional guitar player improvising, backing himself into musical corners just to work out the best way to get out of them.
A track like this could only ever be written as a jam, as George Clinton himself admitted that the concept was focused towards exploring the freedom of funk, leaning into the limitless nature of the genre. Eddie Hazel is the man playing guitar on the track, and the only direction he was given by Clinton was to play as if his mother had just died, and then play like she was actually still alive.
Cream – ‘Sunshine of Your Love’
This song is certainly one of the most famous riffs of all time, and it came too while riffing about. Jack Bruce had been at a Jimi Hendrix gig and got the idea for the song after watching the Seattle-born shredder perform, so when he and Pete Brown then started staying up late in a bid to make music together, that riff was the first thing that fell out of Bruce’s fingers, and the rest is history.
“We had very little time to write for Cream, but we happened to have some spare time and Jack came up with the riff,” said Brown, adding, “He was playing a stand-up, he still had his stand-up bass, because he’d been a jazz musician. He was playing stand-up bass, and he said, ‘What about this then?’ and played the famous riff. I looked out the window and wrote down, ‘It’s getting near dawn’. That’s how it happened. It’s actually all true, really, all real stuff.”
Black Sabbath – ‘Paranoid’
Black Sabbath were hard at work in Rockfield Studios, South Wales, putting together their second album, which consisted of elongated, complicated tracks, exploring different sonic soundscapes with each passing second. ‘Planet Caravan’ and ‘War Pigs’ put in the time to take listeners on a real journey, and while they sounded great, the album wasn’t long enough. The band were asked to come up with a short, radio-friendly hit, and the jam that followed next would result in Black Sabbath’s (and heavy metal’s) most iconic track of all time.
“Rodger Bain, the producer, suggested that we might think about doing a commercial song. We were adamant that we wouldn’t, but he said, ‘See what you can come up with’, so we went off on our lunch break and when we got back, Tony had come up with the riff,” recalled Bill Ward, “I sat down, Ozzy went to his mic, Geezer strapped on his bass and we started playing. What you hear on the album is literally 25 minutes of work! The only thing we added was Tony’s guitar solo, which he recorded the next day. I couldn’t believe how that song went off: everybody went nuts about it.”
