I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who’s “Tommy” as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it — in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks.
I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he — always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge — told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend’s electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums.
Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 “Rumble,” he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier — a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, “You Really Got Me.”
I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 — thanks for the sound.
In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:
| The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don’t have sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll then you’re totally done for. It might be the kind that’s on an Eno-Fripp record, but it’s still there — there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there. |
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