LINK
WRAY
PATRON SAINT
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If you adore the sound of a violently distorted rock guitar, then give thanks to a 50's era thug who invented that feral roar through attitude, invention and pure dumb luck. In 1958, Link Wray stepped onstage at a Fredericksburg Virginia arena and tried to figure out how to address the kids' request for a stroll (a popular line dance of the time, performed to a slow, swinging groove).
"I just made up something on the spot, because I didn't know any stroll tunes," says the guitarist, who improvised the instrumental that was to become "Rumble" with one of the most brutal two0chord intros to ever blast out of an amp.
But it wasn't just Wray's ingenuity under fire that drove the dancers crazy at deejay Milt Grant's record hop, it was also the strange and primitive sound of his guitar - a tone that was accidentally produced by Vernon Wray's naive attempt at being a soundman.
"Because ther3e was no vocal on this song, my brother thought we should spotlight the guitar," remembers Wray. "So he took the vocal mic and put it in front of my amp, which just distorted the heck out of the small P.A. speakers."
Grant - who was well aware of the burgeoning power of rock and roll, and who was also a savvy evaluator of audience reactions - quickly brought Wray and his band into Washington DC's U.S. Recorders (US Recording Studio) . This was yet another mistake that ultimately paid dividends.
"That place wasn't even a music studio," says Wray. "It was used by politicians to record their speeches, and the engineer had never recorded a band before. For example when he miked the kick drum, he put the microphone behind the drum by my brother's foot (another Wray sibling, Doug, was the band's drummer). But that's how we got that knockin' bass drum sound."
Replicating the street-punk growl that sent shivers down the spines of the record hoppers required a little creative destruction, as Wray's 1953 Gibson Les Paul and puny Premier amp weren't up to the task at hand.
"When I tried to remember the sound that made those kids scream, I missed the distortion right away," says Wray. "The sound was too clean - at the gig, the amps were jumping up and down, burning up with sound. Vernon asked, 'What are we going to do about it?' I said, 'I'm gonna mess with the amp so it's fucking up like it was at the live show.' So I took a pencil and punched holes in each of the Premier's two 10" speakers. Vernon said, 'You're just screwing up your amplifier!' But I said, 'Who cars as long as we get the sound, man?'
"I left the amp's single 15 " speaker untouched, and then I put one mic on each of the distorting speakers and one mic on the clean 15"/ It took three takes to get the sound I wanted, because everything was mixed down to a one track Grundig recorder. I stood in front of the drums and pointed my amp toward the opposite wall, Shorty (Horton, Wray's standup bassist) stood to my left. We taped a mic to the internal soundpost of the bass through a hole that was kicked into the instrument during a bar fight. Vernon was sitting behind the drums, and we recorded his acoustic guitar with a single boom mic. After the first take, I asked for the kick drum to be louder. The second take was okay, but I wanted to do another one. The third take sounded so damn good that I said, 'I ain't messing with it anymore!' I think Milt paid like $57 for the whole session."
But the record that prompted Pete Townshend to famously state, "If it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would never have picked up a guitar," almost didn't get released. The angle who rescued the instrumental from obscurity was the 17 year old daughter of Cadence Records owner Archie Bleyer, who grabbed the platter out of a pile of her father's acetates while looking for something to play at a birthday party. The teenager loved the tune, enthused over how it reminded her of the gang scenes in West Side Story, and inspired her dad to rename the song "Rumble" (the works original title is long forgotten). (actually, the working title was "Oddball") The success of the record was phenomenal, reaching number 16 on the national charts and selling more than million copies - even as Wray and Bleyer were attacked for prompting teenage gang warfare with the track.
But while the runaway success of "Rumble" put Wray on the map, it didn't line his pickets. "Bleyer stole everything," he says. "I was just a nobody.
Those in the know, however, are well aware that, while Wray may not be a People-esque star presence, he is absolutely the inventor of the power chord, as well as the musical bridge between early black blues cats cranking up their tiny amps and '60's white boys winging distorted riffs through Fenders and Marshalls. Forget about Clapton, Page, Hendrix and Beck directly interpreting the blues into the roar that was blues rock - and, from there, into rock, heavy metal, punk, grunge, thrash, and nu-metal - because Wray's singles in the last '50s prove that he is the blueprint for the rebellion, swagger and sound the birthed all that is holy about modern rock guitar.
No one would have seen this coming from Wray's more than humble sojourn as a poverty-stricken, half-Shawnee Indian youth in Dunn, North Carolina. Born May 2, 1929, Wray was introduced to the blues at eight years old by a traveling guitarist named Hambone who gave the lad impromptu lessons on the Wray's porch. Originally, it was Hambone's slide playing that entranced Wray and prompted his decision to become a professional musician.
Young white musicians in the early '50s had few career options, however, and Wray and his brothers took the only path that seemed available - playing western swing and country tunes as Lucky Wray and the Lazy Pine Wranglers, and alter, Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands. (The band was named after Vernon, whose "Lucky" appellation was due to his uncanny gambling fortunes.) After returning from the Korean Wary - and losing a lung due to tuberculosis, a state-of-=affairs that forced Link to concentrate on his guitar while brother Vernon handled all the vocals - Wray and his band started experimenting with "big beat" music, and giggled around the Washington D.C. area. "Rumble" and Wray's million-selling follow-up hit "Rawhide" dripped into his life in 1958 and 1959, respectively, but Wray's rebel spirit and artistic integrity impelled him to leave the music industry and move back to his family's five acre farm in Accokeek, Maryland, when subsequent records stalled and the business people sought to clean up his image. At one point, he was reduced to playing "Claire de Lune" and "Danny Boy" with a 62 piece orchestra.
Back on the farm, Wray's father converted a chicken coop into a recording studio, and the Wray brothers established "Wray's Shack Three Tracks" - a seminal homegrown commercial facility. The Wrays were also very early into the artist-controlled label imprint, forming Rumble Records to release Link's 1961 smash "Jack the Ripper" (which was featured in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado and the '80's remake of the film Breathless) and other projects. In the '70s, Wray produced a critically acclaimed but poor selling solo album, Link Wray, and performed with rockabilly revivalist Robert Gordon. In 1978, the under-appreciated rock and roll icon moved to Denmark, married Olive Povsen, had a son, and lived the life of a cult artist.
THE FLAME THAT NEVER DIES
But the Link Wray story doesn't stop there, as the eternal punk is hardly comfortable with the concept of fading away into myth. In 1997, he released Shadowman - a frightening showcase of off-the-cuff guitar power that should humble young guns a third his age - and he continues to record and tour to this day. And seeing the man live is almost a religious experience. At 75, he still wears the leather, still prowls the stage like a thug, and still plays loud and proud.
"I have a guardian angel that you can't see, but I can feel him," reveals Wray about his incredible energy and longevity. "God is my main strength, and he just guides me. I'm like an eagle. I fly wherever the wind takes me."