The one song The Edge said had the quintessential guitar riff
The language of rock and roll guitar didn’t always apply when it came to The Edge.
There are many U2 songs that have a primary focus on the guitar, but whereas the greatest six-string legends that came before relied on flashiness, a lot of what The Edge did was far more subtle whenever he played his licks. He wanted to be a true sonic artist whenever he kicked on those delay pedals, but even with all of those gadgets, nothing could ever take the place of a great rock and roll riff.
And it’s not like The Edge was struggling to come up with licks back in the day, either. ‘I Will Follow’ is a fantastic opening motif to kick off U2’s first album, and even when he was simply arpeggiating chords on a song like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, he made every single note sound like one of the most important pieces of music ever conceived. Because for him, it was as much about building atmosphere as it was with hitting just the right notes whenever the tape started rolling.
Take a song like ‘With or Without You’, for example. The tune is definitely focused on the groove more than anything, but amid the countless guitar overdubs that come in and out of the mix, The Edge’s favourite part of the song is one of the most simple guitar riffs he ever laid down. It’s not exactly rocket science for most people to grapes, but if you can find the right spot for every single lick, it’s hardly a problem when they make up one piece of the final picture.
But The Edge’s knack for writing great parts for songs came from the records he was listening to. The Beatles had always been great tone painters on every one of their later records, and while prog was considered a dirty word by his fellow bandmates, the way that Steve Howe wove in harmonics on Yes songs wasn’t all that dissimilar from what The Edge was doing in the era of albums like War.
If we’re talking about guitarists who were looking at the big picture, though, Jimmy Page really belongs in his own category. There are countless Led Zeppelin songs where his guitar riff is the meat of the entire song, and even when he isn’t leading the charge, you can hear John Bonham often locking in with what Page was playing. So after hanging out with Page during the documentary It Might Get Loud, The Edge was shaking at the chance of getting a tune like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ exactly right.
U2 may have been able to churn out great riffs, but for The Edge, this was like trying to match a piece of history on guitar, saying, “I think you can really see that by the look on my face and on Jack [White’s] face when Jimmy started playing ‘Whole Lotta Love’, which is just the quintessential guitar riff of all time. Just to see how he played it.” But looking at how they interacted, Page couldn’t have been more humble in the face of his fellow players.
It was clear that he was the true living legend in the room when they started playing, but he was just as willing to learn what his new friends were doing as well. It’s one thing to get down to the nitty-gritty of how to play one of the greatest Zeppelin riffs of all time, but when Page talked about trying to figure out The White Stripes’s ‘Seven Nation Army’, you could tell that everyone was speaking the same language whenever they had guitars in their hands.
Because as much as they were separated by age, experience, and respective genres of music, there’s a common understanding among musicians when they let the music do the talking. Not everyone has the same musical chemistry when working together, but when they lock in on the same groove, it can be one of the greatest feelings in the world.
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