A guitar intro is a signature you hear before the singer has earned a word. These ten still stop a room.
10Black Sabbath – “Iron Man” Tony Iommi’s footsteps and the two-note stomp open Paranoid (1970). The riff came from a damaged hand and a downtuned SG. Three notes, and the room already knows the song. It still sounds like someone walking toward the mic.
9Chuck Berry – “Johnny B. Goode” The 1958 Chess intro is rock guitar’s basic grammar, doubled with Johnny Johnson’s piano until the two run as one engine. Berry wrote a country boy who could play, then proved it himself. Every guitarist who starts a solo with that climb is quoting that single.
8The Kinks – “You Really Got Me” Dave Davies slashed his speaker cone with a razor, and the 1964 Pye single came out snarling. The riff is two chords and a grievance. Garage rock, punk and a lot of metal later walked through that door without asking.
7Jimi Hendrix – “Purple Haze” The tritone at the top of Are You Experienced is a wrong note that became the right one. Hendrix cut it in London in 1967 with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. The intro still makes the room lean forward before the vocal arrives.
6AC/DC – “Back in Black” Angus and Malcolm Young wrote the riff in the weeks after Bon Scott’s death. The 1980 title track opens like a slow, hard bell. Brian Johnson had not yet earned the myth. The guitar already had. Grief with a backbeat, no apology.
5Led Zeppelin – “Whole Lotta Love” Jimmy Page’s riff on Led Zeppelin II (1969) is a single figure that makes the rest of the song feel inevitable. The theremin comes later. The intro is enough: space, not speed, as the threat.
4Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Four chords, quiet then loud, recorded with Butch Vig for Nevermind in 1991. Kurt Cobain said he was trying to write a Pixies song. The intro became the decade’s doorbell: clean figure first, crash second.
3Guns N’ Roses – “Sweet Child O’ Mine” Slash has said the opening figure began as a finger exercise in rehearsal before Appetite for Destruction (1987) made it a global signature. The Les Paul climbs like a question the song never quite answers. Overplayed, yes. Still hard to beat as a hello.
2The Rolling Stones – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” Keith Richards woke up with the riff, taped it on a cassette, and the 1965 single put a Maestro fuzz where a horn section might have been. The intro is a complaint you can dance to. Sixty years on, the fuzz still sounds like a grudge.
1Deep Purple – “Smoke on the Water” Ritchie Blackmore’s four-note figure followed the Montreux Casino fire in December 1971, during the Frank Zappa show that Machine Head turned into a lyric. The riff is so plain it should not have lasted. It outlasted the building. Hum two notes anywhere and a stranger finishes them.
