7 RIFFS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
‘That human connection of fingers on strings’: 7 riffs that changed my life with The Red Tack
7 February 2026
Photo: courtesy of Brook Aitken
Detroit Rock City
1.
Kiss
Ted Thacker: I've written songs since I was basically able to talk. But I didn't have an instrument. My friends and I would go to Kiss talent shows, where you’d pretend to be Kiss, lip-syncing and playing fake instruments. Our band was called Black Diamond. And this was just as Kiss’ Alive! came out around 1975.
And I liked Kiss; they were fine, they were fun, and the whole thing about dressing up as them was really cool. But then this album, Destroyer, came out when I was about 10 years old, and the album cover was super cool, super on brand for them. It was hyper-produced, and just the bomb of this first song!
There was a fascinating little entry into the song, where this character is getting off his shift. He's washing dishes, he's listening to the radio, he gets in his car, he drives, and then the song rips into this riff. And for me, it was a new kind of production I'd never heard. It was tough, it was loud, the guitars were just so sharp and heavy. And so, I'm 10 years old and I'm like, ‘I’m picking up the guitar!’ So I made my dad buy me a JCPenney Les Paul.
After that, the same group of kids who had done the Kiss shows, we started a band. I was the guitar player. We called ourselves The Plague. And then there was a small punk uprising here in the Boulder or Denver area in Colorado. And we got lumped in with all these punk bands and we started playing these punk shows. And our first punk show was at this giant stadium in Boulder. We thought, ‘Man, we’re going to play a stadium show!’ But it turned out it was this little side room where they served beer. It fit 100 people, but it was still really cool.
But I think the good thing about us as punks is we had music. And being in a band gave me a different status at my school.
Did you feel like you were a misfit at that point in your life?
My God, yeah! All the parents and teachers were like, ‘Why are you playing this music? Why do you keep going to these shows where all these ne’er-do-wells are hanging around, smoking pot and drinking, and where there are probably heroin addicts?’
I don't know if you know, but mosh pits are one of the most polite places on the planet. You go into a mosh pit and you get the shit beat out of you, but it is in a loving way. So if you get knocked down on the ground, the first rule in a mosh pit is: pick this person up. If they lose their shoe, pick their shoe up and give it back to them.
I still listen to Kiss now. It brings back that boyhood joy!
Ain't Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
2.
Van Halen
By the time I heard this, my band was actually doing fairly well: we were playing gigs, we were having a pretty good time. We were 12 or 13, maybe. Anyway, we had heard about this band, Van Halen, that was really ripping people's faces off. I hadn't heard any Van Halen, but they were playing our town. We tried to break into the show. We stayed up pretty much all night and then we got caught.
I stayed at my friend's house and he had a tape by Van Halen; he was like, ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got the tape’. And he had a boombox. I remember specifically his parents were like, ‘Go to bed, it’s 10 o’clock!’ So he put the tape in the boombox on the coffee table (he was sleeping on the floor and I was on the couch) and he pressed play. And I heard that riff and I was just like, ‘My God!’
He's doing a pinch harmonic, which is where you play one note and make it have all these different harmonics along it. Eddie Van Halen was just doing it like crazy, and it's a super cool way to put little flourishes in there. What struck me the most wasn't Eddie Van Halen's speed so much, it was his rhythm. He's playing with the least effort possible, but it sounds like a super-fast riff. It's just a bunch of pull-offs. That made me sort of sit up and think!
A lot of musicians turn to music because it does have this super freedom that covers you. If you're playing music, nobody fucks with you. We had a thing in our school where the jocks would pick on the punks, and it was just the way it was. The jocks hated the punks.
Punks were obviously hated by moral conservatives. But the punk ethos — that kind of go and do it, start a band, start a fanzine — is something a lot of those conservatives would've probably liked. I mean, dare I say it, Margaret Thatcher would've liked that DIY spirit. But so many artists hated her.
I was on that bandwagon; we wrote songs about Margaret Thatcher, not knowing who she was at all!
Wasted
3.
The Runaways
When the Sex Pistols came, it was just like boom! They were all over the place. But I didn't hear about the Runaways until much later. But if I’d known there was this all-girl band with this amazing guitar player, Lita Ford, they would have been one of my favourite bands.
That riff… it's just the way she plays it. It's just so tough. I saw them playing over in London on some TV show back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. I was like, ‘My God, who is this?’ And it was just prior to Joan Jett blowing up on MTV. And so, yeah, I loved it. Loved them. Loved the way she sings. Loved the way that, you know, they write.
It didn't really advance my guitar playing, but it did make me realise I’d got a big blind spot. In the rock and roll world, it is just all dudes. And so I started making sure that I wasn't just listening to the mainstream output; I tried to find different, interesting stuff.
La Grange
4.
ZZ Top
ZZ Top was all over classic rock radio at this point, which wouldn't play any punk like the Runaways. But it was still cool. I loved ZZ Top back in those days. They got sued by the John Lee Hooker Estate for this riff, but I listened to the John Lee Hooker song and it doesn't sound like it.
It's such a cool guitar part. And that was another place where I decided to step off and understand where that music was coming from. And I started listening to Southern Delta blues… Robert Johnson, stuff like that
Up on the Sun
5.
Meat Puppets
The riff is just the pentatonic minor over the top of an E chord, and you can do any riff along those lines with it, but he just chose that one and repeated it over and over again. Of course, he's one of the greatest guitarists of our generation; his playing is just insane, and watching him play live is so incredible.
Not the Same
6.
Dinosaur Jr.
J Mascis started out as a dirty punk rock guitar player, but then he started branching out into these kind of beautiful melodic leads. It's just a really pretty guitar part. Just hearing him play this, and knowing how far he's come as a guitar player from the years we played with him back in Boston, it's just really cool. [Ted Thacker played in the band Baldo Rex, which formed part of the Boston music scene in the early 1990s.]
See My Jumper Hangin’ on the Line
7.
R.L. Burnside
He's just playing with his fingers and he's getting this full rhythm. It sounds like he's playing a full shuffle. That's one of the things about listening to that kind of homestyle blues music, it’s just in people's backyards and porches. It feels like it's just grown from the human being that's playing it. You know, music played by machines is cool, it's fine, but there's just something about that human connection of fingers on strings that feels really important to me.
A lot of these guitarists are not trained, but they just have this rhythm in their fingers: RL Burnside, Muddy Waters, Albert King and John Lee Hooker. So I started listening to those players a lot, but it was more for the rhythm than it was for anything else. That's what’s fascinated me about guitar for so long: it is a rhythmic instrument; it can be played almost like a drum kit.
Another example is Keith Richards. People think of him as sort of a middling guitarist, but I've tried to play some of his songs and it's really difficult to get his feel. It is so singular.
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