The Greatest Guitar Riff Ever: 1963
The most nominees we've had yet and the first band with two riffs in a single year: who will win?
The Best Riff of 1963
I probably could have just started this series with this year. I just really wanted to include “La Bamba.” Could you blame me? But yeah, we are just off to the races now. Five whole nominees! Also, since from this point through the mid-70s bands often released more than one album in a year, I’m not going to limit each week to one riff per band but rather one riff per album. With all that being said, there are two riffs by one band this week. Hell yeah! Also, programming note, next week is a holiday week and one week from today is my birthday (and the country’s, I suppose), so I’ll be taking the week off from diving deep into Wikipedia dot org and my own brain to research riffs and instead will be throwing my 15-month-old child into the ocean in Wilmington, NC. We’ll be back the following week. For now, here are the riffs.
The Beach Boys - Surfin’ USA
I don’t really love this period of The Beach Boys. I don’t really love The Beach Boys, period, outside of the same two albums everyone else loves. Perhaps it’s just the timing and I’m in Summer Mode and ready to be at the beach, but I’m feeling charitable to this song today. Is the riff ripping off Chuck Berry, like, note for note? Yes. Is that okay with me, the writer of this newsletter? Sure, who gives a shit, rip everyone off there are only so many notes in music. The guitar is cool here. It’s more of a vibe than a particularly great riff. Maybe I’ll throw this on the boombox next week while eating a hotdog on the beach.
The Beatles - Twist and Shout
I’m just going to get this out of the way. I’m not really a diehard Beatles fan. I’m also not one of those brain-dead dorks who would have you believe on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they sucked. They’re good! They’re allowed to just be good! It doesn’t have to be more or less than that. However, their cover of “Twist and Shout” is more than Just Good. It’s fully great. I feel like I should probably ding this for a) being a cover that is pretty faithful to the popular version that predated it (the true original is totally different and kind of sucks) and b) for being so vocally focused that the riff gets drowned in the mix once the vocals come in. I will not be dinging it one bit, however. The riff rocks. This feels like the first True Riff we’ve covered. You hear the guitar in the intro and you immediately know what’s coming. I can imagine Ferris Bueller singing along to it just thinking about the riff. This rocks.
The Beatles - Hold Me Tight
“Twist and Shout” is great but here’s the thing about The Beatles’ first record: it sucks. I never listen to it because it’s bad and because of that, I almost only ever hear “Twist and Shout” while I’m at a wedding. With the Beatles does not suck. It’s great. “Hold Me Tight” is probably the most guitar-driven song on the record and the guitar does not let up at all the whole song. It feels like a riff the band would continue to play variations of throughout their career, even up to “Back in the USSR,” which ultimately was only five years later but in Sixties Time that might as well have been 15 years. I love Lennon’s rhythm guitar and I love that you can still hear it once Paul starts singing. Great tune.
Ike and Tina Turner - It’s Gonna Work Out Fine
A brief confession: I’ve never listened to the music of Ike Turner, which means by extension, I’ve never listened to a lot of the music considered to be Tina Turner’s best material. Like a lot of people seemingly soft-cancelled before I was even born, it just kinda seemed like what’s the point. I’m going to become a big Ike Turner fan in the 2000s? Be serious. This song though? What the fuck, man. This rocks. Tina is obviously incredible. What a talent, what a voice. This isn’t a vocals newsletter though, it’s a guitar newsletter. Here’s the thing: I love the guitar effect Tremolo. I think part of why I enjoy this era of music so much is they barely had any effects so they would just use whatever few effects they did have constantly, which means tremolo was on like everything. This track, “Rumble,” hell, pretty much every surf rock song ever, etc. This riff lacks the flashiness or constant propulsion of some of the other riffs we’ve discussed but - as an obsessive freak about tone - it’s hard to make guitar that sounds much better than this to me.
The Ventures - Green Onions
It was brought to my attention last week by a loyal reader of this newsletter that they disagreed with me choosing “Miserlou,” which they did admit was great, and that they personally would have picked “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs, which is admittedly a great song. My rebuttal was that while the guitar is cool on that song, it isn’t really a riff and more just like sporadic guitar chords with the keys carrying the real riffing of the song. Lo and Behold - The Ventures had a cover of it just waiting in the chamber for me to find this week where it’s almost entirely guitar-based. Spoiler alert: it isn’t going to win this week, but I wanted to highlight briefly a great song with an incredibly cool part. The keys still are here but the guitar is way more present throughout. What a tune.
What is the Best Riff of 1963?
I would say that the song that ended up wowing me from a “this guitar sounds fucking awesome” standpoint would be “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” Like, that guitar really sounds fucking awesome and I’m going to go listen to that record right away instead of the record from the winning riff. But, if I’m trying to be “““““objective””””” the actual riff itself is doing less than the winner this week - it just sounds cooler from a tone standpoint. The winner is “Hold Me Tight.” Begrudgingly, yes, but the winner nonetheless.
Does it top the previous Best Riff?
This is a weird one. The basketball playoffs just ended so I’m thinking about how the Minnesota Timberwolves seemed like a team built to beat the defending champs - the Denver Nuggets - but couldn’t beat the Dallas Mavericks, who would have almost certainly lost to the Nuggets themselves. “Miserlou” and “La Bamba” felt like a real competition between two pretty similar riffs where one just edged out the other. While I stand by picking “Miserlou” out of those two and while I think “Hold Me Tight” should beat “Miserlou,” I can’t get it out of my head that I would probably pick “La Bamba” over “Hold Me Tight” were they to face each other. Oh well. The Nuggets didn’t get to pick their opponents and that’s why the motherfucking Boston Celtics are champs and everything sucks in the world again. “Hold Me Tight” is up against “Miserlou” and not some other riff that lost and because of that, it wins. See ya in two weeks.