“A great compliment”: The one riff Jimi Hendrix called a landmark for rock
The entire guitar community can probably point to the arrival of Jimi Hendrix as the moment when everything changed. He had learned a lot of his craft by working as Little Richard’s guitarist, but after leaving the army and picking up a guitar again, his debut in England set the entire rock scene on fire and made everyone pay attention to the strange sounds he was getting out of his guitar. But Hendrix didn’t start out that way, and he remembered getting an education by listening to many of the British acts coming over to the States.
When looking at the early 1960s, many of the biggest British invasion bands were about taking the same blues tropes of rock and roll and making it into something entirely different. The Beatles sounded almost nothing like Elvis Presley or Little Richard, but the minute that they started climbing the charts with their own hits, they showed that there was something a bit more aggressive that could excite rock and roll fans.
In fact, some of the biggest acts of the British invasion were the ones that truly perfected the idea of the rock and roll guitar riff. The concept of guitar parts have existed since the days of blues, but whereas most of them were following typical blues conventions like when Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson played them, hearing Keith Richards only use five notes to get the audience hooked in on ‘Satisfaction’ was the king of swagger that Hendrix absorbed naturally.
Everyone had a vision for what a guitarist should be, but Hendrix managed to go beyond their expectations by a long shot. No one knew how to squeeze raw pain out of a guitar like he could, and even when he made it a spectacle by playing with his teeth and playing behind his head, it was always in service to the song rather than trying to grandstand.
But while The Beatles and The Stones were a good place to start, and Cream even offered Hendrix a chance to sit in with them, The Kinks get left out of the story far too often. Whereas most people bring up Ray Davies’s fantastic tales of English life on tunes like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, Hendrix remembered being transfixed as soon as he heard the busted-up sound of ‘You Really Got Me’, complete with a guitar riff that every single kid itching to be a rockstar had to get under their fingers.
And when Dave Davies talked about meeting Hendrix, he remembered the legend telling him that the song changed his thought about rock guitar, saying, “I remember once sitting next to him on a plane bound for Stockholm. After a while, we got talking a little and he suddenly said to me: ‘Y’know, that guitar riff you did on ‘You Really Got Me’ was a real landmark.’ You can imagine how I felt. To be endorsed by Hendrix was really something. It was a great compliment.”
It might not be the flashiest guitar playing anyone has ever heard, but if this managed to sound great on the radio, there was no limit to what artists could do. Despite Hendrix being eerily precise whenever he played, it’s hard to think of the recklessness of songs like ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ without having ‘You Really Got Me’ coming first, only for Hendrix to take it that much further whenever he strapped on his guitar.
So while many people tend to be a bit snobby when talking about the lack of precision in The Kinks’ classic, Hendrix knew that the basics work for a reason. Because for any wannabe guitarist, this is ground zero, and if you could make the guitar snarl like this, you would be taking the first steps towards becoming a guitar god.
