What Legends Choose When Nobody Is Ranking Them
This article explores how three iconic rock guitarists—Angus Young, Eric Johnson, and Ritchie Blackmore—describe their own favorite songs and solos, revealing the personal influences, hidden struggles, and unexpected inspirations that shaped some of rock’s most celebrated guitar voices. When guitar heroes talk about their own high‑water marks, they are not reciting fan‑voted rankings; they are exposing what they chase, what they doubt, and what still excites them after decades of playing. That makes their choices far more revealing than any poll. For fans, these picks are a direct line into how rock musicians find inspiration, not only from their heroes but from the riffs and records they wrestled into existence themselves.
Most AC/DC devotees like to argue eras, but Angus Young cuts through the nostalgia by talking about what he cannot stop playing. When pressed on standout Bon Scott‑era material, he keeps returning to “Riff Raff” from the 1978 album Powerage, plus the swaggering “Bad Boy Boogie” from Let There Be Rock, which he has called his favorite Bon Scott album. That is the headline: the man who wrote the riffs does not pick the obvious stadium anthems; he picks the songs that still feel dangerous under his fingers. His taste is a reminder that what becomes a hit and what a creator loves are often two different things—and that the creator’s list is usually the more interesting one.
Angus Young’s Favorite Bon Scott Songs: Swing, Grit and Self‑Judgment
Angus Young’s favorite songs from the Bon Scott era show a player obsessed with feel over fame. Asked to name AC/DC tracks with great guitar riffs, he singles out “Riff Raff” on Powerage as “a cooking guitar riff” and even calls it a “platonic ideal” of a rock riff. He hears in it a Chuck Berry‑style backbone mixed with a swing that is “unique to AC/DC,” proof that his inner compass points to groove first, flash second. If you want to understand hard rock rhythm guitar, that is the track to dissect.
His other pet pick, “Bad Boy Boogie” from Let There Be Rock, tells the same story. It is not their most streamed song, but it carries the twisted boogie feel he loves, loose and lewd yet tightly locked. Significantly, Let There Be Rock is the Bon Scott album Angus names as his favorite. That matters more than any critic list: it says he values raw, slightly unhinged records over polished perfection. If you are a guitarist, the lesson is blunt. Chasing charts is a dead end; chasing the riff that makes you smirk every night onstage is the point.
Eric Johnson: Overwhelmed, Then Transformed by His Guitar Influences
Born in Austin in 1954 and later honored with a Grammy for “Cliffs Of Dover,” Eric Johnson is often treated as a technical benchmark. But his own stories about formative records make him sound less like a virtuoso and more like a lifelong fan fighting to catch up. His earliest soundtrack at home was swing and jazz—Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington played by his father—before rock crept in through Elvis’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” which he still praises. That mix of big‑band harmony and early rock melody explains why even his heaviest tones carry a lyrical, almost vocal sensibility.
Johnson is disarmingly honest about being knocked flat by his heroes. Hearing Hendrix’s Are You Experienced for the first time, he says it felt like “somebody had landed from outer space,” and admits the record was “over my head” to the point that he was not sure he even liked it at first. The more he listened, the more he recognized its greatness. That evolution—from confusion to devotion—is the crucial part. Add in his reverence for Joni Mitchell’s Ladies Of The Canyon and Clouds, particularly the emotional weight of “For Free,” and the sophistication of Stevie Wonder’s Music Of My Mind, which he calls the greatest album of all time for its writing and musicality, and you see the pattern: his tone is built from records that challenged him, not ones that flattered him.
Ritchie Blackmore’s Favorite Solos: Complexity, Classical Ghosts and Human Limits
Ritchie Blackmore’s name is often reduced to a handful of riffs, yet his own favorite Rainbow solos point somewhere stranger and richer. One is “Gates of Babylon” from Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll, a 1978 track whose riff he wrote on cello and then kept inverting in the studio, to the point that it changes slightly each time you hear it. He loves the tune and the solo, but there is a twist: the band managed to play it live only once because he could not remember how to execute the shifting riff after the session. He recalls drummer Cozy Powell scolding him—“You’re playing it wrong!”—until Blackmore finally threw up his hands and said he could not play it and the band should drop it. The message is brutal and refreshing: even legends can write beyond their own live abilities.
His other cherished solo lurks in a deep cut: “Weiss Heim,” originally the B‑side to “All Night Long” from Rainbow’s 1979 album Down to Earth. It is a lyrical instrumental that, as commentators have noted, weaves in a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach’s First Prelude from The Well‑Tempered Clavier, underlining how strongly classical music informs Blackmore’s phrasing. Between the unmanageable complexity of “Gates of Babylon” and the baroque elegance of “Weiss Heim,” you get a portrait of a guitarist forever tugged between experimentation and form. These aren’t crowd‑pleasers; they are the tracks he keeps for himself.
What These Favorites Tell the Rest of Us About Rock Inspiration
Taken together, the choices of Angus Young, Eric Johnson and Ritchie Blackmore explode the myth that great players emerge from nowhere. Angus openly builds “Riff Raff” on a Chuck Berry‑type feel, then bends it into a swinging AC/DC groove. Johnson grew up hearing jazz and swing at home, then had his brain rewired by Elvis, Hendrix, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder. Blackmore threads Bach into Rainbow instrumentals. Rock musicians inspiration is always part collage, part confession.
These stories also show that even giants doubt themselves and wrestle with their own work. Blackmore essentially retired one of his favorite solos because the riff mutated beyond what he could recall. Johnson initially found one of his core guitar influences—Are You Experienced—not just challenging but alien, and only grew to love it after repeated listening. Angus prefers the tougher, less obvious Bon Scott cuts over the canonical hits. If you play, the lesson is blunt: chase the riffs and records that stretch you, even when they confuse you, and do not be shocked when your proudest moments are not the ones the crowd screams for. That tension is where rock stays alive.
