The song Lars Ulrich said had “the most classic riff of all time”
When talking about the greatest drummers of all time, Lars Ulrich is usually the first or very last that anyone would think of putting on their respective lists.
Although he helped turn his drumming into a core part of Metallica’s sound and steered them through each hardship that they ever had to face, it’s not like he’s the most technically gifted player in the world or didn’t have a few embarrassing moments in his catalogue. But his superpower wasn’t about being the greatest drummer; it was about being an unwavering fan of all stripes of rock and roll music throughout his career.
The only reason why he and James Hetfield managed to get together back in the day was them bonding over the greatest metal bands that they could get their hands on at the time. No one in the US had heard of bands like Diamond Head at the time, but as far as they were concerned, they were as important as The Rolling Stones in terms of convincing them to start putting together their own riffs.
But whenever talking about the legacy of heavy metal, there’s normally a hierarchy of people who get credit for starting it before Metallica. The Beatles had experimented with heavy tunes on ‘Helter Skelter’, and even The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ often gets cited as the first official “heavy metal” riff, but it wasn’t until bands like Black Sabbath rolled around that the genre seemed to clearly have a face.
Although every single metal band on this Earth was influenced by Sabbath in some capacity, they weren’t alone, either. Led Zeppelin were already making heavy music that gave Sabbath a blueprint to work from, and it’s clear listening to ‘Paranoid’ that they heard ‘Communication Breakdown’ and managed to make it just a little bit more sinister when singing about feelings of paranoia and depression that Ozzy Osbourne was singing about.
For Ulrich, though, there was no greater influence than what Deep Purple did for music. The American market might not have had the same impression listening to many of Purple’s classics, but when inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ulrich was the first in line to induct them. Still, he couldn’t help but call attention to the songs that even casual rock fans would know by the back of their hand.
In naming all of their songs, Ulrich couldn’t be convinced that ‘Smoke on the Water’ wasn’t one of the best riffs that Ritchie Blackmore ever came up with, saying, “There’s one more song, right? The one everybody knows about Frank Zappa and a burning casino on a Swiss lake. The one that features perhaps the most classic riff of all time. The first thing anybody learns on guitar. The riff that has actually been banned in music stores to preserve the sanity of the staff. The riff that even I, the most illiterate guitar player in the world, can actually play.”
While the song has entered into that exclusive club of being a makeshift Guitar Centre employee torture device, that doesn’t discount the power of the riff, either. Blackmore was already working with much more simplistic arrangements on Machine Head, and hearing him take only four notes and make them feel as important as a classical piece of music is half of what all good hard rock is all about.
Purple were far from the first band to identify with the term ‘heavy metal’ when they started making music, but listening to ‘Smoke on the Water’, there’s definitely the skeleton of the genre hidden somewhere in its grooves. Most people would consider this standard rock and roll, but heavy metal is a genre that proves all good music lies in the delivery rather than the notes on the page.
