The one band Slash said had the best riffs of them all
From day one, Slash has always been the student of all great riff writers.
Whether that was listening to the old David Bowie records in his mother’s record collection or studying every line that Keith Richards came up with, every great rock and roll tune starts with those few notes that make the hairs on your arm stand up. And in an era when people started to forget that important riffs were to rock and roll, Slash seemed to come in like a bolt of lightning the minute that Guns N’ Roses started kicking ass and taking names up and down the Sunset Strip.
It’s not like Slash was ever trying to change rock and roll, overnight, though. A lot of what Guns played was practically a love letter to all the great music that he heard growing up, and it’s easy to pick out a lick that came from an old Aerosmith record or the bluesy leads that Eric Clapton would have recognised in an instant when he first started playing. It was all a part of continuing the tradition of rock and roll, but Slash knew he needed to take it that one step further whenever he played.
After all, they had also come from the punk tradition, and hearing them fly off the handle every now and again felt like listening to Johnny Thunders with the same kind of skill level as Jeff Beck or Joe Perry. Everything that rock and roll was capable of was pushed to the nth degree whenever the guitarist took to the stage, but he never for a second thought that he could match what his legends were doing.
For all of the great music that he has made, Slash has also been the most self-effacing guitar god in history. There’s no way he would ever accept that kind of title, and when listening to his back catalogue, he’s always more likely to talk about how proud he was of getting the solos right than wondering about where he fits in the grand book of rock and roll. Because, really, how does anyone with a straight face think they are going to match what Led Zeppelin could do?
Jimmy Page had already been given a riff clinic when working with The Yardbirds, and by the time he was ready to lead his own outfit, he was practically churning out riffs faster than most people could digest them. The debut Zeppelin record was already filled to the brim with classic tunes, but coming back with the opening riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ practically announced 1970s rock and roll a few months before the decade even started.
And while Slash grew up studying those riffs, he couldn’t even attempt to think of one that stood out above the rest, saying, “I was thinking ‘Whole Lotta Love’, because when that record came out I was a little kid, but ‘Black Dog’ was another one. Zeppelin had probably the biggest cache of killer riffs more than any other band.” Granted, was anyone else not named Keith Richards going to argue with that?
I mean, half the reason why hard rock sounds the way it does up until the present day is because of what Page did with the guitar. There were pieces of it that were still blues based, but when listening to everything from ‘Immigrant Song’ to ‘Rock and Roll’ to ‘When the Levee Breaks’, every single one of them would have been good enough to spawn any other band’s career.
So while Guns N’ Roses have their signature brand of sleazy rock and roll down to a science at this point, there’s a reason why Slash holds Page’s riffs to a higher standard than anyone else. They were on a different level than most people, and had John Bonham not passed away, they would have continued on that upward trajectory for as long as the music industry would have them.
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