Ron Asheton, The Stooges, “TV Eye” (1970): It can be easy to forget that simple is often best. Ron Asheton has one good idea in “TV Eye,” a pentatonic riff in Am. He plays like 40 times in a row, as Iggy Pop hoots, wails, and tries to eat the microphone. When the song needs a change up, the instruments drop out…and then the riff comes back! Simple, genius. Don’t fuck around.
John McLaughlin, Miles Davis, “Right Off” (1970): On “Right Off,” John McLaughlin shows just about everything that you can do with one chord (though he actually finds a second one about 20 minutes into the song). His improvisations provide a perfect bed for one of Davs’s most ripping trumpet solos.
Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, “What Goes On [Live 1969]” (Released 1974): The dirty secret of practicing guitar is that 90-some percent of the time you’re playing with a band, you’re playing rhythm. For as much as guitar magazines slobber over majestic solos and technical leads, that really doesn’t get audience’s asses moving as much as a chopped barre chord. Speaking of chopped barre chords, here The Velvet Underground take a song that was initially four minutes long, and double its length without arranging any new parts. They just ride this motherfucker into the ground. Its three chord progression borrows a V chord for the “chorus” section and then just flips back to the “verse” giving the song a sense of movement, even though it actually isn’t going anywhere. An organ lead floats above the dueling rhythm guitars with a part so tasty it would be nicked for Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” People wearing tight black clothes would hate to admit that The Velvet Underground were a jam band as much as a “punk” band, The Grateful Dead of NYC. The Dead, however, never strummed as hard as the Velvets.
Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner (I think), The Ohio Players, “Love Rollercoaster” (1975): What does a roller coaster sound like? An ascending riff followed by a descending riff. Funk guitarists like Eddie Hazel, Nile Rogers, Leo Nocentelli, Wah Wah Watson, and Jimmy Nolen all deserve props for their left handed comping and right handed strumming. But The Ohio players make it on this list for writing a song called “Rollercoaster” with a riff that sounds like a rollercoaster.
Tom Herman, Peter Laughner, and Scott Krauss, Peru Ubu, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” (1975): This one is a weird gem: lyrics about a pilot on a suicide mission, swooping rhythm chords and a surfy lead played over a discordant triad, a buzzy synth that sounds like a jet taking off. It’s a single that’s six minutes long? The first song I wrote was called “Castle Bravo.” It was me trying to do this.
Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, Television: “Venus” (1977): Volume swells, gorgeous and extended descending licks, arpeggios high on the neck, twin guitarists trading off leads. And they called this punk rock? Television didn’t even play power chords.
Robert Quine, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, “Blank Generation” (1977): One of the most underrated guitar gods, Robert Quine looked like an accountant and played like a free jazz saxophonist. Check out the solo at 1:20. What key is this song in? Who cares?
Andy Gill, Gang of Four, “Love Like Anthrax” (1979): Feedback has been enshrined as part of the rock vocabulary since Jimi Hendrix’s screechy/beautiful rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” during Woodstock, but usually as a side-effect of a live performance, or in the case of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music album, an experiment/fuck you to decorum/his record label. Andy Gill, who reinvented rhythm guitar for post-punk, begins this dance track with 90 seconds of feedback. How do you make a guitar feed back more aggressively? Hit it.
Greg Ginn, Black Flag, “Rise Above” (1981): A descending chromatic riff! I love a descending chromatic riff. Ginn would later evolve into the avant-garde trash god of hardcore punk, but before he was recording grinding nine-minute improvisations, he was cranking out riffy two-minute bangers with killer arthouse solos.
Boon, The Minutemen, “Anchor” (1983): The Minutemen, three corndogs from the San Pedro, California, asked what if you didn’t have to yell all the time and shave your head like a Nazi to write short, punchy songs. Boon showed me how to play one guitar in a band with no distortion.
Richard Jakimyszyn (I think), Lime Spiders, “Slave Girl” (1985): We already covered these type of one-riff monsters with “TV Eye”, but I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone else who has heard this song, and I think it rips. There is a wrinkle: if you want to spice it up, just add another guitar playing chaotically at opportune moments.
Mark Arm and Steve Turner, Mudhoney, “Touch Me I’m Sick” (1988): I remember reading Arm once saying that the guitar tone he was aiming for on their debut EP Superfuzz Big Muff (named after the distortion pedals) was the brown sound that Ron Asheton’s guitar made between strums. It’s not quite that discordant on “Touch Me I’m Sick,” but it is plenty chewy. I love how the second power chord is a flat five. If you want something to sound instantly deranged, do that.
Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth (1988): “Teenage Riot” begins Sonic Youth’s masterwork Daydream Nation with a feint. You think it’s gonna be a quiet one, and then 1:20 in, a new riff enters, and after another 20 seconds of warming up, we’re off to the races, and we’ve a full-blown anthem on our hands. Although Renaldo and Moore used alternative tunings (GGDDGG and GABDEG), “Teenage Riot” does not sound especially discordant. I can’t think of a better song to introduce this wonderful band to a total newbie. NOTE: The SY pick could’ve easily been Neil Young’s favorite, their epic “Expressway to Yr Skull.” (Also: Young could’ve easily made this list. He’s a favorite of mine. But he’s no one’s idea of “Undersung.” Maybe be less famous, “Old Man.”)