Sugarloaf’s “Green Eyed Lady” also evolved out of a guitar practice exercise.
Tom Morello came up with the riffs for Rage Against The Machine’s Killing in the Name while teaching one of his students. He stopped the lesson and recorded the riffs. Pretty cool lesson to have had.
Maybe not a perfect fit for the OP, but the Dixie Cups’ version of Iko Iko came about from an impromptu jam session where they started singing a song they learned from one of their grandmothers, tapping on various items with drumsticks to keep the rhythm.
Similarly, the jam at the end of the Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” came about because the tape was still rolling when the band thought the song was over, Mick Taylor kept playing, and the rest of band picked their instruments back up and joined in. So, not strictly a practice or rehearsal riff, but more of “happy accident” (as Bob Ross would say).
Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” was never recorded in the studio. The only version recorded is the first performance.
Live recordings rule. I think this is pretty much improvised.
“I see a line of trees and I want to paint them black. You need the dark to show the light.”
The most well-known piece of music by The Refreshments is likely the theme to King of the Hill, which was just a little jam they did at soundchecks.
I heard a DJ tell this story about the Doobie Brother’s Black Water on the radio years ago and Wikipedia backs it up.
“I was sitting out in the studio waiting between takes and I played that part. All the sudden I heard the [talk-back] go on and [producer] Ted Templeman says: ‘What is that?’ I said: ‘It’s just a little riff that I came up with that I’ve been tweaking with.’ He goes: ‘I love that. You really should write a song using that riff.’”
The chorus for “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)” was improvised in the studio to fill out the song. It was intended as a placeholder, but the song was released with it.
Maybe this should be split into a separate Placeholder thread.
I heard an interview with Eddie Money long ago and he was saying the most recognizable part of “Two Tickets to Paradise” was a fluke. He knew a guy who played trumpet and had written Two Tickets to include a Flugle horn part (Flugle Horn was popular at the time, just ask Stephen Strange) and hired the guy to play the part in the studio. But he knew it was a risk because the guy was quite a boozer. He stretched out his studio time and got all the other layers perfect, and filled in the horn part with “Whoa Whoa oh-oh oh-oh oh-oh whoa!” where the horn would later be overdubbed.
The guy never showed and the producer thought the vocal fill-in sounded great & convinced Eddie to use it.
One of the last gigs Eddie Money did was for a holiday party that my employer arranged a few years ago. Some of my colleagues were musicians* and sound engineers and they rehearsed and performed as Eddie’s back-up band. For the last song of the night, he did Two Tickets and one of the guys played Flugle Horn where it was supposed to be played. It wasn’t better or worse, it was just different – like the electric versus acoustic versions Eric Clapton does of Layla. Me and my coworkers thought it was a great rendition.
—G!
- I wouldn’t say they were all professionals. Our database managar played sax and clarinet in a jazz band that did bar gigs and events; one of our guys in billing played bass and trumpet and percussion for a local reggae band, another guy in billing played guitar and ran a recording studio in his apartment; a lady in IT was married to a bass guitarist in a local country band; the CEO’s boyfriend was a drummer for a classic rock band. None of these guys were selling CD’s by the crate-loads, but they were good enough to do local gigs without scaring away the patrons. Maybe that’s a bit high of a standard for ‘Professional’ but, after all, we’re on the edge of Hollywood – in fact a couple of our accountants had previously worked for major record companies (as accountants, not performing musically).
‘Birthday’ by the Beatles? I rather doubt if Macca came into the studio with that all polished and camera-ready!
I’ve seen more than one interview where he says that about the opening riff of “Life in the Fast Lane.”
The long horn solo, theoretically played by the hero (but actually by the 1st horn in the orchestra) in Siegfried, Act II, just before the fight with the dragon, is said to have been taken from an exercise that Wagner overheard his principal horn player working on. When the player first saw it in the score, he said, “Herr Wagner, this is impossible!”, but Wagner replied, “Don’t be silly. I heard you playing it yesterday!” - YouTube