Rumble
Rumble is a rock composition released in 1958 by guitarists Link Wray and Milt Grant, played by their band Link Wray & His Ray Men . The instrumental in the previous style of blues rock had three peculiarities that made it into rock history:
- Link Wray played the electric guitar with a previously unknown distortion and other new effects.
- He limited himself to the use of mainly three strings and thus shaped the power chord, which was fundamental for later electric guitarists .
- Rumble was a provocation to the establishment . The band presented the piece in a raw and unemotional way, contrasting the clean, well-groomed attitude towards life of the up-and-coming post-war America, conveyed by the music industry and by rock greats like Elvis Presley . The Ray Men are therefore considered to be the forerunners of punk and metal .
history
When they performed in Fredericksburg, Virginia in early 1958, the band improvised a blues they called oddball . The piece so excited and disturbed the guests that the Ray Men played four encores with this one title.
The New York musician and producer Archie Bleyer found out about it and released the piece in April 1958 on his label Cadence Records . The track "Rumble" came from Phil Everly ( The Everly Brothers ), who went in and out of Bleyer's studio; the play reminded him of riot and street fighting.
The 2'25 minute long version of the single became a hit within a few weeks. It rose to number 16 on the US charts in the summer of 1958 . Some American radio stations banned the single because of its supposedly subversive character. It was the first instrumental piece to fall under censorship.
Rumble has been covered many times , including in 1964 by the English pop band The Dave Clark Five . For some electric guitarists in the 1960s, the piece was considered an important inspiration. The Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page named the single as the reason to deal with the electric guitar at all. Rumble appears in numerous films, such as Pulp Fiction and The Sopranos .
Distortion and feedback
The musically special thing about the very monotonous and slow running piece is the distortion of the electric guitar, which was still in its infancy at the time. Link Wray used feedback to create vibrato and overdriven the guitar amp's tubes to create more volume. He poked holes in the membrane of the speakers. When he did the same with the studio boxes, his record producer wanted to throw him out.
From a musicological point of view , Rumble is considered to be the link between the early electrified blues guitarists such as T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker and the first major players in rock guitar such as Eric Clapton , Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix .
literature
- Robert Rodriguez: The 1950s' Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Rock & Roll Rebels, Cold War Crises, and All-American Oddities . Brassey's, 2006
- Cary O'Dell: Rumble - Link Wray (1958) . Article at the Library of Congress , 2008