The Led Zeppelin riff Dave Grohl struggled to play: “It has these wicked turnarounds”
From day one, Dave Grohl always considered himself a drummer first and a songwriter second. Although he may have carved himself out as one of the greatest songsmiths of his time with Foo Fighters, Grohl still approaches his craft like a drumset, looking at the guitar like he would approach the cymbals and kick drum behind the kit. Although Grohl might look at the percussive value of a guitar, he still knows the beauty of coming up with a great riff.
In fact, Grohl is perhaps one of the last great bastions of rock music. Thinking about the icons of the current scene, there is nobody who commands more respect, has seen more flashes of genius and rumbles of true rebellion than Grohl. Whether it is with Nirvana or Foo Fighters, he is a gatekeeper of the scene and can therefore guide anyone about great guitars.
Then again, Grohl’s musical journey was meant to be behind the kit. When first starting out playing music, the frontman would recall spending time learning drums on his bed while listening to Rush records in the background. When he finally decided to pick up the guitar, though, he always gravitated towards the sound of The Beatles.
Compared to the other rock bands assembled in his record collection, the Fab Four were the ones responsible for teaching Grohl how to write melodies, putting together intricate pieces of art that Grohl would later absorb in his songwriting. Even though every rock band since the 1960s followed in the footsteps of The Beatles, the music scene was in for a sea change once Led Zeppelin started making waves in the London clubs.
Formed right in the middle of the British blues boom, Jimmy Page assembled the band to go beyond traditional blues, marrying together the typical bluesy progressions with folk music on songs like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’. As the band started to branch out on their later albums, though, they began to leave the blues behind in favour of songs that catered to pure hard rock.
Releasing their untitled fourth outing with little fanfare, the album starts with ‘Black Dog’. Written by John Paul Jones, the riff is immediate from the moment it starts, sounding slightly disorienting because of its circular groove. While Jones may have been responsible for penning the riff, Grohl thinks that Page was the one who injected life into it. “My favourite guitar player of all time is Jimmy Page. He played everything with such passion, from the heaviest riffs to the most beautiful acoustic music. I mean, some of his acoustic instrumentals were so gorgeous and some of his riffs were just so brutal,” he once explained.
When talking about the greatest songs in rock history, Grohl maintains that the main riff of the song is among the best pieces of music that the genre has to offer, telling Q, “My favourite guitar riff of all time has gotta be ‘Black Dog’. Jimmy played his guitar with swagger; it was in his shoulders. ‘Black Dog’ just drips, it’s so smooth”.
Then again, any guitar riff is only as good as the people behind it, and the rest of the band set Page up by providing the perfect pulse behind him. Although not everything might line up on the grid perfectly, Grohl thinks that the result is one of the best examples of band interaction in rock history.
Grohl explains: “It has these wicked turnarounds where John Bonham stays in 4/4 time, but John Paul Jones and Jimmy turn the riff over. It has a groove and a pulse, and it sounds easy enough, but when you actually wrap your hands around a guitar, you realise that it takes a little more than what you got”.
For any aspiring guitar player trying to get the riff under the fingers, that subtle time change makes the song much more complex than one realises, which can be attributed to the band’s sense of melodic timing. Even though Grohl has written his fair share of classic guitar lines with Foo Fighters and Nirvana, having the swagger to pull off a riff like this comes from the soul rather than the brain.
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