Link Wray and His Ray Men - Rumble

I’m a big proponent of the idea that every day is a school day, and not in an Angus Young way, either. There is always something to be learned, especially in this little Rock and Metal corner of the world we love to live in. For example, did you know that Axl Rose is an anagram for… on second thought, I’d better keep this family friendly. Well, how about the time members of Led Zeppelin used a mud shark to… actually, that one is even worse. Seriously, don’t look it up at work; you have been warned. 

I suppose we need a rock and roll tidbit with a little more of a safe for work aura, then. Well, safe for work as long as you weren’t punching in to several radio stations almost seventy years ago anyway; did you know that this week’s Rock Song of the Week Pick was the first instrumental track to ever be banned from being played on the airwaves? While you might wonder how that’s even possible (through conservative USA policy making lots of things are possible, so jot that down), it is (tentatively, I’ll admit) verified. 

The circumstances, then. For starters, Link Wray and his band of merry Ray Men (later dubbed the Wraymen) released this seven decades ago, when adding heavy distortion to a guitar was about on par with seeking out your local Chief of Police and kicking them firmly up the ass. Rock and roll was still being tentatively accepted by anyone over the age of twenty-three, so the combination of what is quite a sinister guitar tone even now along with the title of Rumble, an era defined slang term for a street fight between rival gangs, meant that a lot of stations were incredibly cautious about stirring up the youth. In a song with no words, no less. Now that’s rock and roll, ladies and gentlemen.

While the long, long list of accolades and accomplishments of Link Wray could fill a book rather than an article – he also popularised the power chord, which is another incredible fact - Rumble remains the legacy of a man who strode into rock and roll as a penniless descendant of the Shawnee Native Americans and rewrote the entire genre. In its own right, Rumble is a piece of rock and roll history; rarely has so much been done by what seems so little by today’s standards. But everything about this track is rock and roll to its very core, from the proto-punk roughness to the fact that one of the Everly Brothers came up with the name for it.  A huge dose of distortion and tremolo feels like child’s play compared to what would come fairly shortly after, but there’s not much, if any of it, that would be knocking around today if not for Link Wray. 

Without any further ado, then, here is a piece of rock royalty so important that it feels remiss not to include it as a Rock Song of the Week pick. You might not get much out of a replay at the length it runs (though, at the length it is, a replay or ten might not hurt you), but you’ve now not only listened to the only instrumental to ever be banned from the radio but have hopefully learned something along the way, too. My tutoring charges are firm but fair and are almost always payable by meat/whiskey/more whiskey.