"Guitar Riff Song of the Ages"

And that riff would be the one belonging to Train Kept a Rollin'.

In its original fingerpoppin' incarnation, the riffing was all piano and scat ba-doo-days. The groove is undergirded with a lyrical bouquet of postwar hipsterisms. This Train also offers up what is probably the greatest double entendre chorus ever written: The train kept a rollin' all night long and I still wouldn't let her go.

The song owes some debt to Cow-Cow Boogie.


Composer Tiny Bradshaw shuffles it along in 1951:



Johnny Burnette recognizes the song's carnal potential and sculpts it with a minor key slink in 1956. The result is a scorching, jungly vibe:

The Yardbirds bring the monumental riff of all rock guitar riffs in 1965. Behind the proto-metal figures, this version returns some residual swing and strips it of Burnette's jungly ambience. Keith Relf's double overlayed vocals are like a brain wrestling with good and evil:



The band rerecorded Train for the movie Blow Up. The producers couldn't get licensing clearance for the original so they changed the lyrics to Stroll On and electrocuted the riff, the fuzz-toned duel leads blowing from Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Many have argued that this is the moment where metal began. Whatever: it's friggin' hot.



Lemmy sludges it up and takes it back to the garage:



Jimmy Page brings it to early Led Zeppelin, 1969:



For most people, the reason they know of the song at all is for Aerosmith. The band released it as a single in 1974. It failed to chart at the time:



Live on television from 1974 on what may be the world's smallest stage:



Imelda May and "good ol' rockabilly":



While I was composing this piece I ran across a post for the Hard Rock Cafe's blog that had the same idea.

Golden Gouldman

Graham Gouldman is best known as a longtime member of the British band 10cc (1972 - 1976, with less interesting incarnations following to present), known primarily for their 1975 hit I'm Not in Love (and maybe Dreadlock Holiday and The Things We Do for Love if you were really paying attention) and not much else stateside. The band generally split between two songwriting factions, one side being the more poppy (Gouldman's side) and the other the more experimental. (Wiki explains.) Now mostly forgotten in the U.S., both sides of this muscled Janus collective were capable of high craft, sharp hooks, humor, and satire. (Go see for yourself: That's what Spotify is for.)

Before 10cc, Gouldman had already established an astonishingly impressive legacy as a songwriter for hire ('69 - '72, he wrote For Your Love at age 19). During this period I'd put Gouldman in an orbit with the best pop songwriters of the era—even early Lennon-McCartney. Unlike the jauntier, major key bounce of his American counterparts, Gouldman's songs had a more melancholic minor key Anglo style and an old school respect for construction. Like most of his peers that grew up in the 50s, he clearly did some time visiting Tin Pan Alley.

As Gouldman says in one video, 1965 was a particularly successful year for him. Though there'd be more good work to follow, the magic of this brief period was something he'd never quite be able to capture again.

Gouldman would record versions of some of these songs himself as The Graham Gouldman Thing. These, of course, would pale against the better known versions by The Yardbirds, Hollies, etc. (He also did some time in the bubblegum factory with Ohio Express, much to his later regret.) More recently, Gouldman has trotted out these nuggets for an airing in a more naked form without the layers of vocal harmonies and accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. Time has shown them no worse for wear—the songs remain supple and smooth with nary a sag or varicose vein in sight.

In some of the videos he adds a short introduction of how the tune came to be:



As done by Herman's Hermits:






From the Yardbirds in the Clapton era:

In 10cc, Gouldman usually partnered up with bandmates for songwriting, most often Eric Stewart as he did on these three (I'm Not in Love, the same chords as Hall and Oates's She's Gone). Here's a very Beatle-y thing he did 2000 where it might be argued he found some of that early magic again:

Here's an exhaustive and passionate overview of Gouldman's career created by a much more generous blogger than I.