Geoff Duncan

Word comes that rock'n'roll guitar pioneer Link Wray died on November 5th at his home in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was 76.

Wray is best known for his instrumentals "Jack the Ripper" (1963), "Rawhide" (1959) (no, not the "keep them doggies rollin'" tune of the same name), and particularly 1958's classic "Rumble." They're all essentially articulations of basic blues forms, but Wray introduced a few new elements: deliberate distortion (by punching holes in his speaker cones: amps with overdrives and stomp boxes were still years off) and a deliberate…well, there's no other word for it. A deliberate menace.

Wray was born in Dunn, North Carolina, and was three-quarters Shawnee Indian; with his brothers Doug and Vernon, he first gained notoriety as a country act before coming out with the instrumentals which would define his career. With long dark hair and a leather jacket, Link Wray was the prototype for what became punk and heavy metal. No tune expresses this better than the slow, deliberate groove and force of "Rumble," which—as an instrumental!—so offended '50s sensibilities that many radio stations banned it outright, claiming it would incite teen violence.

Like many artists of his time, Wray didn't have rights to his seminal recordings, although despite a rights dispute with his brothers (the Raymen or Wraymen, depending) Wray wasn't particularly bitter about it, and certainly he never had to worry about his sound being confused with anyone else. Wray's recordings have maintained their presence in popular culture, and have been particularly popular with modern film directors, appearing in the soundtracks for films such as Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, 12 Monkeys, Blow, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Desperado, and Road Racers.

Wray is often credited (by non-musicians) with inventing the so-called power chord. Although he certainly played a role in popularizing the power chord as perhaps the signature electric guitar sound, I doubt he would have made any claim to have created it. A power chord is just the root and fifth of a chord: they're gloriously undefined, incomplete chords which are neither major or minor. They've been around forever, in fact, there's a good chance that power chords were among humanity's first forays in to harmony: the physics of music makes the fifth an interval common to every culture.

Anyway—in rock'n'roll, adding fifth is just a way of thickening up what amounts to single-note harmony. Power chords are easy on the hands (usually played on just two or three adjacent strings) and easy on the mind: if you can pick out a melody on a guitar, you can often rock it up with just power chords. Or you can create a signature riff: Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" and Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water"—both played in endless loops by teenage guitar students—are famously nothing but power chords.

At a technical level, Wray wasn't concerned with being an extraordinary guitarist—he neither put himself alongside nor sought to compete with the likes of Chet Atkins, Wes Montgomery, Django Rheinhardt, Hank Garland, or Charlie Christian. His goal was to produce a sound which was truly his own, and he accomplished that in western culture to a degree unmatched by any of those guitar greats, and possibly only matched by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Eddie Van Halen, or Duane Eddy. Essentially, anyone playing rock and roll or its many offshoots emulates Link Wray, directly or indirectly. There are lots of extraordinary guitar players, but few who truly put their stamp on an era. Link Wray was one of the greatest.