Maximum Riffage

Chose this Top 50 classic for my errand run last night. Was particularly touched by this tasty brontosaurus burger of a riff. If you wanna call this the greatest riff of all-time, I will not argue.

To this, I like to imagine my team lumbering over the rest of the league’s dead, decaying bodies in the XFL at the conclusion of the 2015 season.

2 thoughts on “Maximum Riffage

  1. Heavy, man. You’re talking about the opening riff I assume but the middle-end part is just as good. I do tend to crack up whenever I hear Ozzy sing. Tony Iommi has the speed riff rep but he’s a good string bender too. Sabbath brings me back to the summer of 1971, the summer of The Trestle. There is a small railroad bridge over Pelhamdale Ave in Pelham Manor, NY, and it made us a great place to party. The bridge had concrete ledges on the sides, and big steps. Perfect for us. The street was a main street as far as Pelham goes, that is to say not a main street at all, but we could and did interact with passers by. But the cops used to chase us off. That was another great thing about the Trestle: the cops absolutely could not catch us. To even approach us they would have to climb the big steps or the wooded hill next to them. That gained us all the time we needed, because on the other side of the tracks a lies a wide ditch, a 6-foot fence and I-95. By the time they got up there we were gone across the highway and dispersed into Pelham backyards.

    But we got tired of running, so we moved down the tracks and off the street. We found a nice wider area about 100 yards down and furnished it with two couches, two easy chairs, two mattresses and carpeting, all of which we picked up off the street during Junk Week. Junk Week in Pelham Manor was Treasure Week for us since we were little, I mean 6-7 years old. The things these people threw away is not to be believed. We also found an old, beautiful Philco radio that was a piece of furniture itself, and a standing lamp, and finished it off with a broken window hung on a tree just behind us. Those tracks were used for freight trains only, except for one Boston-Washington passenger train that flew though about * PM. When we saw it coming we would pose in a family portrait. The engineer took to waving his can at us out his window.

    We used to sing a lot, and imitate instruments vocally. Chris Heinl was the champ at this. He could do the guitar solo in American Woman so you’d fall on the floor. John Odau was best at low-register Black Sabbath riffs although I had a good one too. I’m tempted to play MIssissippi Queen, from around that time and certainly it is a great slab of sludge, but I remembered that we all really liked this song from the same album at least as much. Somehow it never made it to Classic Rock radio>

  2. First of all, let’s get the obligatory “More Cowbell!” out of the way.

    Cool story.

    For me, Mountain was one of many bands who, when they were on, they were great, but their albums were always clogged up with ballads and noodling between the killers (like this one).

    That’s a big part of what sucked me into punk right off the bat.

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