The one guitar riff that defined the 1970s, according to Slash
No one on the Sunset Strip was quite prepared for what Guns N’ Roses brought to the table on their debut record. Although the band were able to make the most grizzled rock and roll of their generation, it was only matched by their taste for excess, with guitarist Slash indulging in every drug he could think of in the band’s early days. Underneath all of the Jack Daniels, though, there was an impressive musical mind hidden underneath the top hat.
It is easy to reduce Slash to iconography, the silhouette alone enough to conjure an era. Yet the image has always threatened to eclipse the substance. Behind the caricature of excess sat a player obsessed with feel, tone and the slow burn of a well-placed note.
Coming out of the bluesy tradition, Slash wasn’t looking to be yet another model of the Eddie Van Halen wannabes. Instead of priding himself on being able to play long-running tapping solos, Slash was much more interested in doing solos that were lyrical, following in the footsteps of the guitar giants that came before him, like Joe Perry and Eric Clapton.
When hashing out his first riffs on guitar, Slash was in the middle of the most remarkable reinventions in rock music history. As much as the artists of the 1960s were still hanging around, rock and roll was beginning to get a lot nastier as well, with artists like Cream getting heavier across albums like Disraeli Gears.
Although Slash was the ideal audience for heavy riffs, he still thought Led Zeppelin had his brand of rock and roll solidified from the beginning. Being born out of the blues tradition, Jimmy Page formed Zeppelin out of The Yardbirds, taking the basis of rock and roll and putting it into the context of hard rock, making the basis of what would become the guitar riff on songs like ‘Good Times Bad Times’ and ‘Communication Breakdown’.
After one album under their belt, the band hashed out material on the road before coming up with ‘Whole Lotta Love’, featuring the most savage announcement that Page had ever made on a song. Featuring only a handful of notes, Slash thought that he had heard the future of music when he listened to it for the first time.
When talking about his favourite licks from Zeppelin, Slash thought ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was predicting the future, telling Nikki Sixx, “My first favourite riff when I was a kid had to be ‘Whole Lotta Love’. For me, that was the soundtrack for what the 1970s were going to be. It was so driving, and it was sexy. I think that record [Led Zeppelin II] was the thing that first drew me into the Les Paul too.”
While Page kept the bluesy shuffle for the song, the makings of hard rock history are hidden within those grooves. Listening back to the song, the seeds were being planted for other bands to follow, with artists like Black Sabbath and Aerosmith quickly following in the band’s footsteps towards music that was a bit heavier than what was typically heard on the radio.
By the time Slash picked up a Les Paul in earnest, that blueprint had already hardened into gospel. What he absorbed was not just the riff itself but the attitude behind it, the understanding that restraint can make heaviness hit harder. In that sense, his playing is less imitation and more continuation, a lineage stretching from Page’s swagger to the snarling heart of Appetite for Destruction.
If Page was the musical teacher, Slash was responsible for applying every lesson he taught. Across Guns N’ Roses’ debut Appetite for Destruction, songs like ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ are the ultimate showcases of Slash working in the Zeppelin formula, working off a groove to create a hypnotic musical passage that makes fans listen again and again. Although Slash may have a sound all his own, it has only been cultivated by what Page has brought to the table.
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