Think Link

Fred Lincoln “Link” Wray Jr (May 2, 1929 – November 5, 2005) was an American rock and roll guitarist, composer and occasional singer.

Link Wray is the man many claim did more for Rock’n’Roll than Elvis. He’s the man to whom many attribute the roots of heavy rock. He’s also the man who turned his back on the industry, became a virtual hermit, making music in his back-to-basics farm in the middle of nowhere USA, for the best part of a decade. Conversely he’s also the man who was later hailed as a true icon of punk rock. And, even years after his death, rock guitar legend Link Wray still is causing controversy in the world of music. For, to the bewilderment of many and the anger of others, he’s yet to be awarded induction into the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame and Museum...

The Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and Museum has been in existence for over twenty years. While its most recent inductees include Madonna, Leonard Cohen and John Mellencamp, it lists among previous performers the likes of Van Halen, U2, Bob Seger ZZ Top, Eddie Cochrane and of course Elvis’s – both Costello and Presley. Link Wray, who Pete Townsend in 1974 claimed as “the king” is still out in a virtual wilderness, only, this time, unlike that prolonged period in the sixties, it’s anything but a self-imposed exile.

Born Fred Lincoln Wray, to a white father and a part Shawnee Indian mother, Link began life in North Carolina, learning at the age of eight to play slide guitar from a black carnival traveller called Hambone. His love of music was shared by his three other brothers, and although Link suffered tuberculosis during his service in the Korean War, on his release from the US army he performed in bands with the other members of his family. Due to his illness – he lost a lung – he was advised not to sing and so set his focus on perfecting his guitar playing. Doing the circuit of virtual obscurity as a country and western band and then a country swing band, it was as a backing band – a kind of pick-up unit for artists appearing on the local version of American bandstand – called Milt Grant’s House Party (kind of like Jools Holland’s Later, but for the way under forties), that they shared the stage but not the limelight with the likes of early Rock and Roll legend Fats Domino and bobby sox hero Ricky Nelson.

It was on one such an occasion – this time during a recording of a show in-front of a live audience that Link Wray experienced a breakthrough which would change his life – and the course of rock music history forever. Attempting to nail the backing for the tune the Stroll, in preparation for the Diamonds performance of their hit song. It was then that the band inadvertently came up with a dirty twelve bar blues which, only sounded remotely like it’s intended song...indeed, it was so removed from the Stroll that the audience mistook it for an original tune and demanded four encores.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Cadence Records head man Archie Bleyer got wind of the huge fuss which had been made about this tune and asked to hear it.

It didn’t take him long to decided that he hated it. But it was his young stepdaughter who eventually convinced him to give the guys a chance – she loved the tune. She was also the one who convinced them to change the name. Originally called Oddball, it was given the way more inspiring title Rumble, a name she came up with because it reminded her of the fight scene in West Side Story. Rumble was street parlance for ‘gang fight’.

The track was not only distinctive for its uncompromising title. The dark and ominous guitar sound, which Wray tried very hard to recreate in the studio after that first memorable live performance was the result of him poking a pencil into his amplifier speaker – and was born the fuzz tone. While it was that sound that would become the template for rock and roll guitar as we know it, back in 1956 it was enough to get the track banned on a number of radio stations. The title and the sonic rawness, it was argued, was a rally cry to juvenile delinquency – a neat trick for a track with no lyrics. Despite this, it became a huge hit – both here in the UK and in the US. It reached number 16 in the US national charts.

Cadence couldn’t handle the heat of the controversy and let Wray go. The track set the template for further Link Wray hits through the fifties and early sixties – raw, electric guitar lead instrumentals with names like Jack The Ripper, Ace of Spades and ‘Rawhide’ – which Wray, frustrated by the culture of the labels and their desire to mould him into a less edgy performer released on his own label and sold through the back of his car until it was eventually picked up by the Swan label.

By the mid sixties Wray announced that he was ready for retirement and the life of a farmer. But his retirement was more like a self imposed exile, turning his back on the restrictive record industry he built his own recording studio in a disused chicken coop on his farm in rural Maryland and settled into a live of virtual, if not unpleasant obscurity in doing so, getting more in tune with his increasingly prevalent Shawnee Indian heritage.

Until, that is, in 1971 when Polydor released a self titled LP culled from those back yard sessions – a record which marked a departure from his rock’n’roll garage band style tunes and had more in common with Van Morrisson, The Band and the Rolling Stones take on Americana. Although it received great critical acclaim, it returned poor sales figures. This return to mainstream resulted in performances on the same bill as a variety of Summer Of Love nostalgia acts and then later on in the seventies with Robert Gordon – the rockabilly revivalist who reintroduced him to UK audiences and especially the burgeoning punk generation who empathised with his nonconformism and outsider status.

It was post-modern Hollywood which kept him in the limelight through the 80’s and 90’s with films such as John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and the 83 remake of Breathless (starring Richard Gere) and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, using his work as part of their soundtracks.

Enjoying something of a revival through a lexicon of soundtracks inclusions, Wray toured the US in 2005 – leaving his home in Sweden, where he had settled and married (he met his wife some years before while she was studying Native American history in the States) in the 90’s, he played forty dates to celebrate the release of Wray’s Three Track Shack – songs he recorded during his period of splendid isolation on his Maryland farm. He died at home in Copenhagen on November 5th. He was 76.

Now, three years after his death, the campaign to have the man who refused to compromise his art, who championed the cause of fellow native american Indians and inspired everyone from The Who, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and set the template for a sound that we would later call heavy metal is still experiencing what some might brand unjust social exclusion.