Learn the fantastic guitar riffs and licks played by Johnny Winter on his classic blues rock version of Memory Pain.

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Abridged Script

Jim from San Francisco emailed me with a request to create a lesson to explain the guitar riffs and licks used by Johnny Winter on his classic blues rock take on Percy Mayfield’s 1964 song: Memory Pain.

First thing I do when working out a song, is to write down the chord sequence. Johnny Winter did what it seems almost everyone who covered this song did and stretched out the sequence by replacing every bar of the original song with two bars – effectively turning a 12-bar blues into a 24-bar blues.

So here’s the underlying chord sequence. Over the Intro we first hear the main C7 riff, this starts with a nice strong movement from the fifth note of the scale of C – G here at fret 3 on the bottom string to the key note C. The other note that carries a bit of rhythmic weight is the flat seventh Bb at fret 1 on the fifth string. So, these three chord tones outline the C seventh chord and the other two notes could be considered just as chromatic links. However, I don’t think that we should overlook the use of the flatted fifth as the starting note of the song. This is a song about Pain so it makes sense to start on the note that has the most painful relationship when compared to the key note of the song.

To explain the main part of the riff we need to look at an idea that is frequently used in Blues Rock compositions – stringing together major chords rooted on the notes of the minor pentatonic scale. So here are the notes of the C minor pentatonic as we normally play them in lead guitar, but if we now string these out say up the length of the fifth string and turn them into either power chords - or major chords - we have a nice simple basis to create all kinds of bluesy/rocky sounding rhythm guitar parts… and the tail end of this riff is just straight from the C minor pentatonic scale. Easily found in the fourth position pattern. The remainder of the Intro is also entirely from the C Minor scale.

Although, we are not used to fingering this Ab note here at fret 13 on the third string when we play pentatonic patterns. Truth is though that this note is immediately bent up to sound in unison with the Bb at fret 11 on the second string – a note we are used to including in the pentatonic scales. Neat trick coming into the pentatonic from the sharp 5 in this case.

Now it’s into the verse. And here we slide chromatically into a three string C7 chord from one step above and then substitute the C7#9 chord - known the world over as ‘the Hendrix chord’ – a nice way to add a bit of angst to a dominant seventh. Then, very similarly to how we began the intro we are using a bass line to link from C7 to F7 chord.

Next we are introduced to the main riff used over F7 in the song. This is really just a nice piece of rhythm guitar work, messing around with the F chord. It starts by implying an F minor chord changed to the Major by hammering on the third – changing the Ab to an A and then bounces off the chord a fourth higher – another commonly used trick in rhythm guitar – in this case we are implying a change to Bb as a passing chord between F and F7. You can see these two notes as being part of a ‘D7’ shaped F7. …then at the end of the line we come back to the chromatic link used at the start of the intro to take us back to the C7 chord.
The first half of line two of the verse we repeat the C7 Riff from the Intro …then it’s into a lightning-fast lick that, at first glance looks like it is based on the C Minor pentatonic scale. …But there are two notes used in this passage that don’t belong to the pentatonic scale. Fret 10 on the top string gives us the note D – the second note in the key of C… and fret ten on the second string gives us an A – the 6th note in the key of C. If we add these two notes to the C minor pentatonic we get a C Dorian mode so, strictly speaking we have to say these licks are based on the C Dorian scale.

The third line of the verse uses the F7 riff from earlier, then links back to it again via a pair of hammer-ons using notes from the C minor pentatonic before ending the line with the same chromatic link back to C7 as used at the end of line 1.

So that takes us halfway through the verse. I’ll take a look at the remainder of the verse in the next lesson in this series.

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