Link Wray RIP
Luther's Blues
Madison, Wisconsin
Sunday February 2, 2003

Source: just left of soundboard>CoreSounds Binaurals > Sony D8 DAT
Transfer: DAT > WAV > SHN

last 15-20 minutes of performance is missing
Openers = Waterdogs and Jet City Fix


Link Wray

Influential rock'n'roll pioneer with a raw, primal sound

Garth Cartwright
Tuesday November 22, 2005
The Guardian

Link Wray, the original master blaster of rock'n'roll guitar, has died at his home in Copenhagen, aged 76. He enjoyed little mainstream success but his primal music guaranteed him a cult following that kept him working right up to this year. Indeed, the last 15 years found him enjoying a higher profile than at any time since his initial hits, with such films as Pulp Fiction and Independence Day employing his music.
Wray's talent was a limited one, but in his ability to employ distortion and push the electric guitar to places that it had never been before, he was a 20th-century innovator. His best recordings retain their original menace and raw power, and his influence on rock music cannot be overestimated: the Who's Pete Townshend acknowledged, "He is the king; if it hadn't been for Link Wray and Rumble, I would have never picked up a guitar."
Wray was born in Dunn, North Carolina, to semi-literate Shawnee Native American parents. His father suffered from shell shock as a result of his experience in the first world war. The family lived an itinerant life, often sleeping rough, earning a meagre living from farm work and street preaching. "Elvis, he grew up white-man poor; I was growing up Shawnee poor," Wray told an interviewer. He recalled that his family lived in fear of the Ku Klux Klan.
Wray started playing the guitar as a child. While serving in the Korean war, he contacted tuberculosis and had a lung removed. With his brothers, Vernon and Doug, he recorded country songs as the Palomino Ranch Hands in 1955. Changing their name to the Ray-Men, they jumped aboard the rock'n'roll juggernaut then under way.
Wray claimed that his lack of musical ability forced him to invent sounds. He effectively did this by punching holes in his amplifier and running a major chord up and down the fret board, thus creating the thundering sound known as the power chord. "I was looking for something Chet Atkins wasn't doing, that all the jazz kings wasn't doing. I was looking for my own sound," he said.
In 1958, Cadence, a small record company in Washington DC, approved a primitive instrumental recorded by Wray. The label's owner, Archie Bleyer, declined to issue it, until he found his teenage daughter expressing enthusiasm for the work, and saying that it reminded her of the rumble scenes in West Side Story. Bleyer named the instrumental Rumble, and duly released it. The record became a controversial US hit - several radio stations banned it for fear of inciting teenage violence.
Bleyer panicked and told Wray he had to clean up his act. Instead, he signed with Epic Records, where he scored with the instrumental Rawhide. Epic also tried to clean up Wray, forcing him to record standards when his appeal was about creating the crudest sounding music ever recorded.
Wray and his brothers left Epic and briefly formed Rumble Records, issuing three singles, including an instrumental called Jack the Ripper, which was picked up by Philadelphia's Swan Records and gave Wray his final US hit. The years at Swan found Wray at his most productive, as the label allowed him the freedom to record his instrumentals unhindered by executive decisions. He turned the family chicken coop into a crude recording studio and produced wild, experimental guitar instrumentals, while continuing to play in many of America's grimmest bars and clubs. But the British invasion by the likes of the Beatles rendered Wray obsolete. The fact that John Lennon and other British guitarists loved his work was an irony that passed him by.
Wray's fortunes waxed and waned throughout the 1970s. Many celebrated rock musicians championed him as an unsung pioneer. He was brought to England to record for Virgin Records, then produced two high-profile albums with retro-rockabilly singer Robert Gordon. If he never enjoyed mainstream success, at least his talent was acknowledged and Europe gave him a new audience.
In 1979, Wray married Olive Julie Povlsen, a Danish student of Native American culture; the following year, they settled in Copenhagen. Povlsen began managing Wray in 1981. The 1980s rockabilly revival raised his profile, while the inclusion of Jack the Ripper in Richard Gere's 1983 film, Breathless, proved how cinematic his music was. He is survived by his wife and son.
· Frederick Lincoln Wray Jr, musician, born May 2 1929; died November 5 2005



OBITUARIES
Link Wray, 76; Rebel Guitarist's Power Chord in 'Rumble' Started Rock Music on Its Journey to Punk and Heavy Metal
By Dennis McLellan, LA Times Staff Writer

Link Wray, the rock guitar pioneer who gave birth to the aggressively primal sound known as the power chord on his 1958 instrumental hit "Rumble" and influenced two generations of rock guitarists, has died. He was 76.

Wray died Nov. 5 at his home in Copenhagen, his family said on his website. Although no cause of death was given, his wife, Olive, and son, Oliver, wrote that the North Carolina native's heart had been "getting tired."

On stage, the rebel Wray never tired of wielding his ax.

"He just loved playing," said Michael Molenda, editor in chief of Guitar Player magazine, who saw Wray perform last July at Slim's, a small San Francisco club.

"He was certainly a young soul, very gracious, kind of like a punk to the end," Molenda said Monday. "He wasn't like a guy who was 76 years old. He was like a 19-year-old in a 76-year-old body."

Robert Hilburn, The Times' pop music critic, said Monday that Wray "was one of the key figures who helped establish the guitar as the instrument of choice in rock."

Wray, Hilburn said, "was someone who turned the sensualness and mystery of the blues into a supercharged sound that was both eerie and anxious. His key works were powered by a force and, even at times, a brutalness that encouraged generations of musicians to explore the extreme boundaries of human emotion and sonic possibility."

The legendary three-chord riff that Wray used in "Rumble," his signature tune and biggest seller, has reverberated down through the decades.

"Without the power chord, punk rock and heavy metal would not exist," Dan Del Fiorentino, historian for the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, said Monday.

Countless musicians, including Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and Jeff Beck, are said to have been influenced by Wray.

"He is the king; if it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar," Pete Townshend of the Who wrote for one of Wray's albums.

Neil Young once said, "If I could go back in time and see any band, it would be Link Wray and the Wraymen."

Del Fiorentino said the raunchy sound of Wray's guitar in "Rumble" represented a different attitude in rock music.

"It added more of a zing, more of a delinquency, if you will, to rock 'n' roll," he said.

And Wray, the 1950s performer, personified his sound on stage.

"Who else in rock 'n' roll had a leather jacket and was smoking cigarettes, with sunglasses on in the middle of the night?

"That was him," Del Fiorentino said.

Citing the impact of "Rumble," Molenda wondered what it must have been like "to hear that big, distorted, evil ferocious chord for the first time."

"Fifties rock was pretty clean, and you've got this guy - he's got a leather jacket, he looks scary - and all of a sudden he plays this loud chord that practically tears your eyebrows off your face," said Molenda. "It was extremely sexy and aggressive, and it kind of paved the way for the next level of rock 'n' roll."

Wray's legendary sound originated at a record hop hosted by a local DJ in Fredericksburg, Va.


Link Wray, 76, a Guitarist With Raw Rockabilly Sound, Dies Top of Form 1

By BEN SISARIO NY Times
Published: November 22, 2005
Link Wray, a rockabilly guitarist whose raw sound and inventive techniques influenced musicians from the early days of rock 'n' roll into the punk era, died on Nov. 5 at his home in Copenhagen. He was 76.
The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Olive.
With a guitar sound as elegant as it was jagged, Mr. Wray led his band, the Ray Men, in a string of instrumentals from the late 1950's into the mid-60's that have become rockabilly standards. His songs also introduced a handful of scrappy innovations like the driving power chord and distortion made from a damaged amplifier, inspiring generations of rock guitarists.
"He is the king," Pete Townshend of the Who once said of him. "If it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar."
"Rumble," Mr. Wray' s signature song, was released in 1958, and its snarling two-chord pattern remains a symbol of the stylized menace of rockabilly. According to legend, the song got its title when someone said it reminded her of the fight scenes in "West Side Story."
To record it, Mr. Wray punctured his amp with a pencil, damaging the speaker just enough to give the sound a thorny fuzz. Though an instrumental, the song was considered an incentive to violence and was banned from the radio in some cities.
In other songs, like "Raw-Hide" "Jack the Ripper" and "The Swag," Mr. Wray expanded on the vocabulary of "Rumble" and experimented with rougher and more aggressive guitar sounds. To record "Jack the Ripper," Mr. Wray placed his amp in a hotel staircase, creating an eerie and enticing reverb.
Though he was imitated by other rockabilly guitarists, his wider influence was first felt in early British rock bands like the Kinks and the Who, who borrowed his sharp guitar sound, as well as some of his amp-damaging tricks. Others, especially later heavy metal and punk players, also made abundant use of the deep, chunky power chord.
Born in Dunn, N.C., Mr. Wray got started in the mid-50's playing with his brothers Doug and Vernon, and his cousin Shorty Horton. Mr. Wray avoided singing because he had lost a lung from tuberculosis, and so concentrated on instrumentals.
He continued to release seminal recordings into the 1960's, and in the 70's played with the rockabilly singer Robert Gordon . He moved to Denmark in 1980. In addition to his wife, his survivors include a son, Oliver.
After years of obscurity, Mr. Wray's music returned to the spotlight in the 1990's, when it was used in a number of popular films, including Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Robert Rodriguez's "Desperado" and Roland Emmerich's "Independence Day." He then returned to a busy American touring schedule.