The one song Jeff Lynne said had the last great rock riff
Half the albums that Jeff Lynne has worked on have been about trying to find that one mysterious hook that no one had thought of before.
All of ELO’s finest albums have been a love letter to the kind of bands that he heard when he was growing up, but the magic came when he would go beyond anyone’s expectations, whenever he would pivot to a strange chord or hit that one note that could melt people’s hearts. But even with all that orchestration, Lynne never underestimated the power that a great guitar riff can have in the right context.
After all, the whole reason half of us get into playing guitar is because of how cool those early rock and rollers made it look. Everyone from Lynne’s generation was mesmerised by Chuck Berry playing ‘Johnny B Goode’ the same way that everyone else was looking at Michael J Fox shred guitar in Back to the Future, but there comes a point where you want to start looking beyond that bag of tricks.
Say what you will about Berry’s technique, but he wasn’t exactly the most inventive guitar player every single time he broke out his trademark licks. Those guitar parts may have built the foundation of rock and roll, but if it weren’t for people like Keith Richards and Jimmy Page taking the concept of the guitar lick a little further, the genre probably would have died in the late 1950s before anyone had ever heard of the British invasion.
But Lynne was far more focused on building songs rather than focusing on one guitar riff. A great lick might be the perfect icing on the cake to one of his songs, but he wasn’t going to reverse-engineer his songwriting to suit whatever guitar part he wanted to shoehorn in. But in serving the song, there comes a point where the guitar line overshadows practically everything else in the mix.
And Lynne ended up getting an education when working alongside Tom Petty. The Traveling Wilburys may have been one of the first bands in the world to feature five different rhythm guitarists, but when Petty brought in Mike Campbell to help finish off Full Moon Fever, the chief Heartbreaker had his own bag of tricks as well. The slide guitar sounded immaculate on ‘I Won’t Back Down’, but as soon as he kicked off ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’, Lynne was floored that that series of notes could come out of one person’s head.
Everyone in the studio that night had been students of rock and roll, but Lynne thought that Campbell had hit on an instant classic that no one had thought of, with Petty recalling, “All Mike wrote was that one descending riff. I liked the lick a lot, and I’d sit around, playing it on my guitar, experimenting with it in different ways. I came to think it sounded good in a really straight beat, really fast. And I played it for Jeff one night when he was over, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s good. That might be one of those last riffs left.’”
But there are pieces of the riff that were pulled from rock and roll history as well. Campbell wasn’t the first one to invent the idea of a pedal tone in a guitar riff, and while it does have the mojo of an old blues player, it does have a few traits that wouldn’t have felt out of place on an AC/DC record. In fact, given the accents, are we sure this riff isn’t just the cousin of ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’?
Well, regardless of where Campbell may have come across that lick, it still stands as one of the greatest riffs to turn up on one of Petty’s records. It’s fairly simple, and most novice guitarists wouldn’t have that hard of a time getting it under their fingers, but it also doesn’t really get much more rock and roll than that, either.
