Link Wray, 76; Rebel Guitarist’s Power Chord in ‘Rumble’ Started Rock Music on Its Journey to Punk and Heavy Metal
LA Times
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.
