The sound of rock and roll is the sound of a dis­tort­ed gui­tar, but the his­to­ry of that sound pre­dates the genre by a few years. It start­ed out with blues and West­ern swing gui­tarists, search­ing “for a dirt­i­er sound,” writes Noisey in a brief his­to­ry, “a sound that reflect­ed the grit­ti­ness of their music.” That sound was pio­neered by a gui­tarist named Junior Barnard, who played with Bob Wills and his Texas Play­boys and designed his own hum­buck­ing pick­ups to pro­duce a fat­ter, loud­er tone and push his small amp into over­drive. As the Poly­phon­ic video above notes, Barnard was an aggres­sive play­er who need­ed aggres­sive tones, and so, as gui­tarists have always done, he invent­ed the means him­self.

Oth­er fore­run­ners achieved dis­tort­ed tones by crank­ing ear­ly amps like the 18-watt Fend­er Super, first intro­duced in 1947, all the way up, until the vac­u­um tubes clipped the sig­nal to keep from break­ing. Goree Carter, some­times cred­it­ed with record­ing the first rock and roll song, “Rock A While,” pushed the over­driv­en sound in a heav­ier direc­tion than Barnard, play­ing dirty Chuck Berry-like licks in 1949 before Chuck Berry’s first hit. Dis­tor­tion, a sound audio engi­neers strug­gled might­i­ly to avoid in live sound and record­ing, gave blues-based gui­tarists exact­ly what they need­ed for the loud, lewd post­war sounds of rock.

The dis­tort­ed tones of the 40s came from a delib­er­ate desire for grit. Lat­er, even dirt­i­er, gui­tar tones were the result of hap­py acci­dents. Anoth­er con­tender for the first rock and roll recording—Ike Turn­er & His Kings of Rhythm’s 1951 “Rock­et 88”—con­tains some very dis­tort­ed rhythms from gui­tarist Willie Kizart, who, leg­end has it, dropped his tweed Fend­er amp before the ses­sion. Sam Phillips “leaned into” the sound, notes Poly­phon­ic, imme­di­ate­ly hear­ing its serendip­i­tous poten­tial.

Sev­en years lat­er, the evil over­drive of Link Wray’s instru­men­tal “Rum­ble”—so sin­is­ter it was once banned from radio—came from an inten­tion­al equip­ment fail­ure. Wray repeat­ed­ly stabbed the speak­er cone of his amp with a pen­cil.

Do-it-your­self dis­tor­tion con­tin­ued into the six­ties. Fol­low­ing Wray’s lead, the Kinks’ Dave Davies slashed his amp’s speak­er with a razor blade for the fuzzed-out attack of “You Real­ly Got Me” in 1965. But a few years ear­li­er, “fuzz” had already been cod­i­fied in an effects ped­al: Gibson’s 1962 Mae­stro FZ‑1 Fuzz-Tone, part­ly inspired by anoth­er acci­dent, a faulty mix­ing board con­nec­tion that dis­tort­ed Grady Martin’s bass solo in the Mar­ty Rob­bins’ 1961 coun­try tune “Don’t Wor­ry” (below, at 1:25). The Fuzz-Tone most famous­ly drove Kei­th Richards’ riff in “Sat­is­fac­tion,” but it did­n’t sell well. Oth­er, more pop­u­lar fuzz box­es fol­lowed, like the Arbiter Fuzz Face, Jimi Hendrix’s choice for his dis­tort­ed tones.

Hen­drix bril­liant­ly inno­vat­ed new gui­tar effects, and the pow­er­ful Mar­shall amps he played through also drove the dis­tort­ed sounds of Clap­ton, Town­shend, Page, Black­more, etc., who com­pet­ed for grit­ti­er and heav­ier tones and in the process more or less invent­ed met­al gui­tar. In the sev­en­ties and eight­ies, dis­tort­ed tones took on some stan­dard­ized forms, thanks to tran­sis­tors and clas­sic effects ped­als like the Ibanez Tube Scream­er, Pro­Co Rat, and Boss DS‑1. Dis­tinc­tions between over­drive, dis­tor­tion, and fuzz effects can get tech­ni­cal, but in the ear­ly days of rock and roll, dis­tort­ed gui­tar tones came from what­ev­er worked, and it’s that wild ear­ly sound of gear pushed to its lim­its and beyond that every mod­ern dis­tor­tion effect attempts to repli­cate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Only Instru­men­tal Ever Banned from the Radio: Link Wray’s Seduc­tive, Raunchy Song, “Rum­ble” (1958)

Two Gui­tar Effects That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Rock: The Inven­tion of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Ped­als

How a Record­ing Stu­dio Mishap Cre­at­ed the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

Hear the Only Instru­men­tal Ever Banned from the Radio: Link Wray’s Seduc­tive, Raunchy Song, “Rum­ble” (1958)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

There is a scene in Return of the Jedi when Luke Sky­walk­er defeats the mon­strous, man-eat­ing Ran­cor, crush­ing its skull with a por­tullis, and we see the beast’s keep­er, a port­ly shirt­less gen­tle­man in leather breech­es and head­gear, weep­ing over the loss of his beloved friend. I think of this scene when I read about a night in 1974 at San Francisco’s Win­ter­land Ball­room when Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart walked on the stage and found the band’s sound engi­neer Owsley “Bear” Stan­ley stand­ing in front of “a sol­id wall of over 600 speak­ers.”

As Enmore Audio tells it:

Tears streamed down his face and he whis­pered to the mass of wood, met­al, and wiring, with the ten­der­ness of any par­ent wit­ness­ing their child’s first recital, “I love you and you love me—how could you fail me?”

The sto­ry sums up Owsley’s total ded­i­ca­tion to what became known as “The Wall of Sound,” a feat of tech­ni­cal engi­neer­ing that “changed the way tech­ni­cians thought about live engi­neer­ing.” The “three-sto­ry behe­moth… was free of all dis­tor­tion… served as its own mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem and solved many, if not all of the tech­ni­cal prob­lems that sound engi­neers faced at that time.” But, while it had required much tri­al and error and many refine­ments, it did not fail, as you’ll learn in the Poly­phon­ic video above.

Live sound prob­lems not only bedev­iled engi­neers but bands and audi­ences as well. Through­out the six­ties, rock con­certs grew in size and scope, audi­ences grew larg­er and loud­er, yet ampli­fi­ca­tion did not. Low-wattage gui­tar amps could hard­ly be heard over the sound of scream­ing fans. With­out mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems, bands could bare­ly hear them­selves play. This “noise cri­sis,” writes Moth­er­board, “con­front­ed musi­cians who went elec­tric at the height of the war in Viet­nam,” but it has been “rou­tine­ly snuffed from the annals of mod­ern music.”

In dra­mat­ic recre­ations of the peri­od, drums and gui­tars boom and wail over the noise of sta­di­um and fes­ti­val crowds. For ears accus­tomed to the pow­er of mod­ern sound sys­tems, the actu­al expe­ri­ence, by con­trast, would have been under­whelm­ing. Most Bea­t­les fans know the band quit tour­ing in 1966 because they couldn’t hear them­selves over the audi­ence. Things improved some­what, but the Dead, “obsessed with their sound to com­pul­sive degrees,” could not abide the noisy, feed­back-laden, under­pow­ered sit­u­a­tion. Still, they weren’t about to give up play­ing live, and cer­tain­ly not with Owsley on board.

“A Ken­tucky-born crafts­man and for­mer bal­let dancer”—and a man­u­fac­tur­er and dis­trib­uter of “mass quan­ti­ties of high-grade LSD,” whose prof­its financed the Dead for a time—Owsley applied his obses­sion with “sound as both a con­cept and a phys­i­cal thing.” To solve the noise cri­sis for the Dead, he first built an inno­v­a­tive sound sys­tem in 1973 (after serv­ing a cou­ple stints in prison for sell­ing acid). The fol­low­ing year, he sug­gest­ed putting the PA sys­tem behind the band, “a crazy idea at the time.”

His exper­i­ments in ‘74 evolved to include line arrays—“columns of speak­ers… designed to con­trol the dis­per­sion of sound across the fre­quen­cy range”—noise-canceling micro­phones to clear up mud­dy vocals, six sep­a­rate sound sys­tems that could iso­late eleven chan­nels, and a quadra­phon­ic encoder for the bass, “which took a sig­nal,” Enmore notes, “from each string and pro­ject­ed it through its own set of speak­ers.” The mas­sive Wall of Sound could not last long. It had to be stream­lined into a far more man­age­able and cost-effec­tive tour­ing rig. All the same, Owsley and the band’s will­ing­ness take ideas and exe­cu­tion to extreme lengths changed live sound for­ev­er for the bet­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

11,215 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

The Grate­ful Dead’s Final Farewell Con­certs Now Stream­ing Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In the 1940s and 50s, exper­i­men­tal com­posers like Hal­im El-Dabh, Pierre Scha­ef­fer, and Pierre Hen­ry began mak­ing exper­i­men­tal com­po­si­tions that Scha­ef­fer would call musique con­crete. They used tape recorders, phono­graphs, micro­phones and oth­er ana­log elec­tro-acoustic devices to cre­ate music, as Hen­ry put it, from “non-musi­cal sounds.” These tech­niques became main­stays of more famil­iar audio art, such as the radio and tele­vi­sion sound designs of the BBC’s Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. With the advent of syn­the­siz­ers, elec­tron­ic music over­took these sound exper­i­ments, just as oth­er new tech­nolo­gies replaced the play­back and record­ing devices used to make them.

A Japan­ese group called Open Reel Ensem­ble recalls this lega­cy of musique con­crete, deploy­ing reel-to-reel tape machines, cath­ode ray tube TVs, over­head pro­jec­tors, and oth­er ana­log tech­nol­o­gy to make 21st cen­tu­ry music with “non-musi­cal sounds.” Head­ed by pro­gram­mer-turned-com­pos­er Ei Wada, the group embraces a very dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al phi­los­o­phy than the exper­i­men­tal elec­tro-acoustic com­posers of the past, who worked in reac­tion to Euro­pean clas­si­cal music, oppos­ing “con­crete” sounds to abstract musi­cal ideas. Wada, on the oth­er hand, was first inspired by hear­ing a game­lan ensem­ble at a per­for­mance in Indone­sia as a very small child.

Giv­en a col­lec­tion of 70s reel-to-reel recorders by a fam­i­ly friend, he attempt­ed to re-cre­ate the polypho­ny of those tra­di­tion­al Javanese gong ensem­bles. He has, writes Moth­er­board, “been on a quest to repro­duce oth­er­world­ly sounds with tech that nobody wants.” But he freely com­bines these out­dat­ed machines with con­tem­po­rary mix­ers, ampli­fiers, light shows, beats, and tem­pos. Formed with friends Haru­ka Yoshi­da and Masaru Yoshi­da, Wada’s Open Reel Ensem­ble might be com­pared to both the avant-garde exper­i­ments of com­posers like John Cage and the pop­u­lar exper­i­ments of hip hop turntab­lists, both of whom used ana­log tech­nol­o­gy in inno­v­a­tive, uncon­ven­tion­al ways.

Some of the group’s work is a kind of exper­i­men­tal dance music, as you can see in the live per­for­mance fur­ther up; some is more ambi­ent sound art, as in Wada’s solo ven­ti­la­tion fan per­for­mance above, with implic­it com­men­tary on Japan’s econ­o­my and the dis­pos­able nature of con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy. “All these tech objects are a sym­bol of Japan’s eco­nom­ic growth,” says Wada. “but they also get thrown away in great num­bers. It’s good to not just say bye to things that are thrown away but to instill old things with new mean­ing, and cel­e­brate their unique points.”

The detourn­ing of tech­nol­o­gy that would oth­er­wise end up as land­fill requires some inge­nu­ity, giv­en the increas­ing rar­i­ty of such instru­ments. In the per­for­mance above, we see Wada play with invent­ed devices his group calls in Eng­lish the “Exhaust Fan­cil­la­tor” and in Japan­ese a kankisen­thiz­er, a neol­o­gism formed from the word for ven­ti­la­tion fan. “We used laser cut­ters and 3D print­ers to design the ven­ti­la­tion fans,” he says. This will­ing­ness to impro­vise, invent, and repur­pose what­ev­er works makes for some fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments that are as much per­for­mance art as sound com­po­si­tion.

In the Wada per­for­mance above from 2010, he uses old tube TVs as drums, hit­ting the screens to trig­ger both sound and light effects and bring­ing to mind not only the sound art of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, but also the 1980s video instal­la­tions of Nam June Paik, ful­ly immer­sive expe­ri­ences that fore­ground their tech­no­log­i­cal arti­fice even as they pro­duce an inex­plic­a­ble kind of mag­ic.

via This is Colos­sal 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to an Archive of Record­ings by Delia Der­byshire, the Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer & Com­pos­er of the Dr. Who Theme Song

Hear the One Night Sun Ra & John Cage Played Togeth­er in Con­cert (1986)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness