Futurist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Telephone, Free College & Pneumatic Tubes Aplenty
Just shy of 120 years ago, “the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning” told America what would change by the far-flung dawn of 2001. C, X and Q gone from the alphabet; “Air-Ships” in the skies, strictly for military purposes (passenger traffic being handled by “fast electric ships”); strawberries as large as apples; university education “free to every man and woman”: these are just a few of the details of life in the coming 21st century. We for whom the year 2001 is now firmly in the past will get a laugh out of all this. But as with any set of predictions, amid the misses come partial hits. We don’t get our “hot and cold air from spigots,” but we do get it from air-conditioning and heating systems. We don’t send photographs across the world by telegraph, but the device we all keep in our pockets does the job well enough.
Written by a civil engineer named John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. (presumably the son of Smithsonian Curator of Mechanical Technology John Elfreth Watkins, Sr.), “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” ran in the December 1900 issue of that renowned futurological organ Ladies’ Home Journal. You can hear it read aloud, and see it accompanied by historical film clips, in the Voices of the Past video above.
A few years ago the piece came back into circulation on the internet (which goes unmentioned by its experts, more concerned as they were with proliferation of telephone lines and pneumatic tubes) and its predictions were put to the test. At the Saturday Evening Post, Jeff Nilsson gives Watkins (once a Post contributor himself) points for less outlandish prophecies, such as a rise in humanity’s life expectancy and average height.
Watkins describes his sources as “the most learned and conservative minds in America.” In some areas they were too conservative: they foresee “Trains One Hundred and Fifty Miles an Hour,” but as Nilsson notes, today’s “high-speed trains are traveling over 300 mph. Just not in the United States.” Americans did lose their streetcars as predicted, but not due to their replacement by subways and moving sidewalks — and what would these experts make of the streetcar’s 21st-century renaissance? When Watkins writes that “grand opera will be telephoned to private homes,” we may think of the Met’s current COVID-prompted streaming, a scenario that would have occurred to few in a world yet to experience even the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. But then, the future’s defining quality has always been its very unknowability: consider how much has come to pass since we last posted about these predictions here on Open Culture — not least the end of Ladies Home Journal itself.
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How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned Life in the Year 2000: Drawing the Future
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...The History of Rock Mapped Out on the Circuit Board of a Guitar Amplifier: 1400 Musicians, Songwriters & Producers
There is no rock and roll without the blues, as we know, but the relationship between the two is not so straightforward as a one-to-one influence. Blues forms, scales, and melodies are interwoven and interlaced throughout rock in a complex way well represented by the complexity of a circuit board, such as one powering an early guitar amplifier that doubled as a blues harp amp. To understand the relationship, we must understand the blues as a multifaceted phenomenon; at various times in rock history, artists have gravitated more toward acoustic Delta blues, or Memphis blues, or Chicago electric blues, or R&B, all of which themselves have continued to evolve and change.
The influence is persistent and ongoing even in periods after the 70s when radio became largely segregated, and artists moved away from strictly blues forms and explored the seemingly non-blues textures of soft rock, prog, and synth-pop—all genres that have still incorporated the blues in one way or another. As rock and roll expanded, spread out in new, non-blues directions, rock conventions themselves became a drag on the forward movement of the form. But the blues always returns.
Radiohead ditched rock altogether and sit comfortably next to post-rock bands like Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. At the same time, the garage rock revivalism of The Strokes and The White Stripes made sure guitars and 12 bars stayed relevant, as they have, decade after decade, in the raw forms of punk and hardcore or in spaced-out psychedelia. The noisiest noise rock or the harshest and most extreme metal may never be that far away from Bessie Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Robert Johnson, or Lead Belly.
You’ll find this rock and roll circuit board in design house Dorothy’s Rock and Roll Love Blueprint, a history of rock in guitar amp schematic form (ostensibly), showcasing “1400 musicians, artists, songwriters and producers who have been pivotal to the evolution of the sprawling genre that is rock music.”
Like Dorothy’s other schematic pop music histories—alternative music on a transistor radio circuit and hip hop mapped on a turntable diagram—this one organizes its genres, artists, and periods around a series of transistors, capacitors, and valves with big names inside them like Bob Dylan and The Beatles, radiating influence, like electricity, outward.
In many cases, it’s hard to say why some bands and artists get more emphasis than others. Are The Byrds really more influential than The Beach Boys or David Bowie? While it might be possible to quantify such things—and any good technician would insist on getting the values right (or our amp might explode), the Rock and Roll Love Blueprint is a fun visual metaphor that should encourage interest in cultural figures old and new rather than scorching debates about whose name should be a few millimeters larger and to the left.
We begin with W.H. Handy, the father of the blues, and end, on the right side, with the guitar rock of Wolf Alice and The 1975. In-between, the blueprint seems to hit on just about every major or minor-but-influential figure you might name. See the full blueprint, in zoomable high-resolution, and order prints for yourself at Dorothy.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Former Ballerina with Dementia Gracefully Comes Alive to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake
According to dance/movement therapist Erica Hornthal, “dance/movement therapy operates on the premise that our life experiences are held in the body, and that through the use of movement, memories and emotions can be recalled and re-experienced despite cognitive, psychological, or physical impairment.” The video above of former dancer Marta C. González shows in effect how music might activate those muscle memories, as a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake sends Ms. González, a former ballet dancer, into an elegant reverie when she had been barely responsive moments before.
The video was reportedly taken in Valencia, Spain in 2019 and “recently shared by the Asociación Música para Despertar, a Spanish organization that promotes music therapy for those afflicted by memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,” writes Anastasia Tsioulcas at NPR. It has since been shared by celebrities and noncelebrities around the world, an “undoubtedly moving and uplifting” scene that “speaks to the power of music and dance for those suffering from memory loss.”
Many such videos have made headlines, illustrating the findings of neuroscience with moving stories of recovered memory, if only for a brief, shining instant, in the presence of music. The González video doesn’t just warm hearts, however; it also serves as a cautionary tale about sharing viral videos without doing diligence. As Tsioulcas reports, “Alastair Maccaulay, a prominent dance critic formerly with The New York Times, has been chasing González’s history and posting his findings on Instagram.” His most recent post possibly identifies Ms. González as a dancer from Cuba, but the details are murky.
The video’s text identifies her as the prima ballerina of the “New York Ballet” in the 1960s, yet “there is no such known company and the New York City Ballet does not list anyone by that name as one of its alumni.” To complicate the mystery of her identity even further, Macauley says the clips that appear to show a young Marta González, who passed away in 2019, are actually “a former prima ballerina from Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet, Uliana Lopatkina.” So who was Marta C. González? Surely someone will identify her, if she was a prominent ballet dancer. But no matter her personal history, Tchaikovsky “clearly evoked a strong, truly visceral response,” as well as a gracefully muscular one.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
Read More...How the Beach Boys Created Their Pop Masterpieces: “Good Vibrations,” Pet Sounds, and More
If you ever decide to listen through the Beach Boys’ entire studio discography, one album per week, it will take about six months. I know because I just finished doing it myself, beginning with their simple celebration/exploitation of early-60s youth beach-and-car culture Surfin’ Safari and ending, six months yet half a century later, with the lushly elegiac That’s Why God Made the Radio. Between those points, of course, came the songs everyone knows, the hits that made the Beach Boys “America’s Band.” But as many times as we happen to have heard them, how well do we really know, say, “Good Vibrations” or “God Only Knows” — let alone the definitive artistic statement of an album that is Pet Sounds?
We can get to know them better through the work of the music-oriented video essayists of Youtube, who in recent years have turned their attention to the Beach Boys catalog. Not that true pop-music obsessives ever really turned away from it: surely, at some point in your life, you’ve met the kind of exegete intent on convincing you of the artistic glories of the miniature symphonies to teenage longing composed by the band’s mastermind Brian Wilson. But today they can incorporate visuals into their argument, as well as passages from and elements of the music itself, to more clearly reveal the formidable inspiration and craftsmanship that went into these ostensibly straightforward odes to love and good times.
Whether in 1966 or today, even an inattentive listener can sense the scale of ambition present in a song like “Good Vibrations.” As noted in Polyphonic’s analysis, its production cost between $50,000 and $75,000 ($370,000-$550,000 today), making it the most expensive single recording to date. But in its three minutes and 39 seconds, “Brian Wilson managed to put together a song dense enough that you could teach an entire course on it, all while maintaining a devotion to radio-friendly, ear-catching hooks.” The motivation to do this, so the legend has it, came from the Beatles, who earlier that year had redefined the very form of the album with Revolver — a response in part to Pet Sounds, itself fired by the earlier innovations of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul.
This friendly (if high-stakes) competition constitutes the background of the normally Beatles-oriented channel The HollyHobs’ video essay on “God Only Knows,” a song so glorious that even Paul McCartney names it among the best of all time. And it counts as but one of the highlights on Pet Sounds, an overview of which you can hear in this Pitchfork “Liner Notes” video. That video emphasizes Wilson’s central role in the production, something that would be difficult to over-emphasize: when former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor signed on with with Beach Boys, he based his whole campaign on the claim that “Brian Wilson is a genius.”
What makes that true is the subject of the video above by music-and-film Youtuber Jeffrey Stillwell (He’s also created another video looking at the “lost years,” when a psychologically struggling Wilson began to withdraw from the band, but kept on making music.) Only those who listen to the the entire Beach Boys discography can fully appreciate what Wilson brought to the band, and perhaps more importantly, how his work was enriched by the contributions of the other members. These include, among others, the original core of Wilson’s brothers Carl and Dennis, Al Jardine, and even the oft-vilified yet ultimately indispensable Mike Love — not that “Kokomo” is going to inspire a video essay any time soon.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...The Last Video Store: A Short Documentary on How the World’s Oldest Video Store Still Survives Today
When was the last time you went to a video store? Perhaps your habit died with the major rental outlets like Blockbuster Video, all of whose locations closed by early 2014. Or rather, almost all of them: as fans of retro video culture know, the sole Blockbuster store on this Earth rents on in Bend, Oregon. But for all the nostalgic appeal of its blue-and-yellow brand livery, the “last Blockbuster” is at its heart the local operation it had been before the once-mighty international chain assimilated it in 2000. Back then, recall, we cinephiles saw Blockbuster and its like as remorseless corporate predators ready to swallow every independent video store, hardly sparing the ones at which we’d received our own film education.
My own teenage induction into cinephilia happened at Scarecrow Video, which continues to serve Seattle’s film obsessives today. Indeed, of all video stores that have ever existed, only the eccentric independents still stand. This holds true on both sides of the pond: though London now has no video stores at all, Bristol boasts the oldest video store in the world, one with the experientially apt name of 20th Century Flicks. You can have a look at this tenacious operation in Arthur Cauty’s documentary short “The Last Video Store,” which in the words of the shop’s owners and staff explains just how Flicks (as they refer to it) has managed to carve out an economic and cultural space in the 21st century.
“Flicks, because it’s got this very strange, idiosyncratic collection of trash to extreme high-brow movies, we just had this niche that we managed to survive in,” says co-owner David Taylor. Since its founding in 1982 (and through a few moves in that time), the store has amassed “the biggest collection in the U.K. by quite a long way. It’s over 20,000 movies,” which by Taylor’s reckoning is “about five times more than Netflix.” This gets at an unexpected but now common complaint about the streaming-media future in which we now live: despite their technical capacity to offer film libraries of Borgesian vastness, liberated as they are from the increasingly constrained spaces of traditional video stores, even the most successful streaming platforms maintain disappointingly limited selections.
“There’s some good stuff as well, admittedly, but it’s hidden behind all of the trash,” Flicks clerk Daisy Steinhardt says of Netflix, referring to a very different kind of “trash” than that proudly stocked by her store. “If you come here, then you can talk to someone who knows about or at least likes film, and then actually have a conversation rather than just trusting an algorithm.” It is this sense of community — which Blockbuster-style chains failed to offer, and which internet-based services can hardly hope to replicate — on which surviving video stores have capitalized. 20th Century Video have even built a pair of small theaters in the store, which customers can book to view anything in its far-reaching collection. Should a bold investor come along, co-owner David White envisions “a bar, a little restaurant, a retro arcade,” even an entire “emporium for an old-school type of experience.” And who among us wouldn’t enjoy the occasional night out in the 20th century?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Experience the Bob Ross Experience: A New Museum Open in the TV Painter’s Former Studio Home
Bob Ross is as renowned for the gentle encouragement of his voice as for his speedy technique: indeed, these very qualities are synonymous with the name “Bob Ross.” His revival in recent years has as much to do with the de-stressing effects of his permed onscreen persona as with our awe, ironic or otherwise, at his kitschy picture-perfect landscapes in under an hour. He’s become as much a saint of public television as Mr. Rogers and even more of an internet icon.
But unlike most other fandoms, the devoted lovers of Bob Ross have had no place to call their own. They might show up in Bob Ross cosplay at comic con. Yet no Bob Ross Con has made the scene. Leave it to Ross’s original Joy of Painting studio to fill the gap with a museum dedicated to the painting instructor. The Bob Ross Experience is part of a larger campus of buildings called Minnetrista in Muncie, Indiana, founded by the Ball family of Ball mason jars. It’s an “immersive exhibit,” featuring “original paintings and artifacts” and “inspiring visitors with Bob’s message of fearless creativity.”
What more could you want from a Bob Ross museum? Well, maybe a fully-online experience these days. For now, you’ll have to make the trip to Muncie, where locals pay $8 a ticket (kids $6, 3 & under are free) and non-residents shell out $15 ($12 per kid, etc). There may be nowhere else you can see Ross’s happy little trees in person. As Ayun Halliday wrote here recently, “sales of his work hover around zero.” Almost all of his paintings, save a few owned by the Smithsonian and a few private individuals, reside in storage in Northern Virginia, where an exhibit came and went last year.
Ross himself, who honed his method during short breaks in the Air Force, hardly ever exhibited in his lifetime; he was a made-for-TV painter with a small merchandising empire to match. Now, fans can make the pilgrimage to his creative TV home at the Lucius L. Ball house. Swoon over personal relics like his keys and hair pick and, of course, “the artist’s palette knife, easel, and brushes,” writes Colossal. “Many of the artifacts are free to touch.” A current exhibition at the Experience, “Bob Ross at Home” through August 15, 2021, showcases “a few dozen of the artist’s canvases, many on loan from Muncieans who got the works directly from Ross.”
Not only can you hang out on set and view Ross’s paintings and personal effects, but you can also, Artnet reports, “sign up for $70 master classes with certified Bob Ross instructors.” That’s $70 more than it costs to watch the master himself on YouTube, but if you’ve already made the trip…. One only hopes the instructors can channel what George Buss, vice president of the Experience, calls Ross’s best quality, his gentle fearlessness: “He takes what looks like a mistake and turns it into something beautiful.” And that, friends, is the true joy of the Bob Ross experience.
via Colossal
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When ABBA Wrote Music for the Cold War-Themed Musical, Chess: “One of the Best Rock Scores Ever Produced for the Theatre” (1984)
Chess is amazing. The simplicity of its characters and plot (capture the king!) can be appreciated and understood by children; the complexity of its tactics can consume an adult life. Despite its medieval origins—and stumpers for us moderns like the strategic importance of a bishop on the battlefield—chess remains as much a potent allegory for power and its tactics as it was 1,500 years ago in India when it was called “chaturanga.”
The game has inspired great works of literature, film, and arguably every creative move made by Marcel Duchamp. So why not a musical? A musical with a Cold War-era chess battle between a Bobby Fischer-like character and a Russian grandmaster loosely based on Boris Spassky, with music by the guys from ABBA and lyrics by Tim Rice?
The drama is inherent, both within the game itself and its geopolitical significance in 1984, the year the concept album above debuted in advance of the show’s first European tour, a fundraising maneuver also employed before the opening of much better-known Rice shows like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. While Andrew Lloyd Webber may be an excellent stage composer, though not to everyone’s taste, partisans of Mamma Mia! might agree with critic William Henry, who wrote at Time that Chess, the musical is “one of the best rock scores ever produced for the theatre.”
The show itself, Henry wrote, was “difficult, demanding and rewarding” and pushed “the boundaries of the form.” According to a site documenting its history:
Chess at London’s Prince Edward Theatre was a love story set amid a world championship chess match, the tensions of the Cold War, and a media circus. It ran for three years. When the Berlin Wall fell, a radically altered version of the show was presented on Broadway and failed.
The new version, with lyrics by Richard Nelson, ran for only two months. Its unpopularity did not tarnish the reputation of Chess, which was revived to great acclaim several times afterward. The show may not have had the widespread cultural resonance of Hamilton or the gravitas of Nixon in China, but Chess has inspired devotion among musical fans, ranking seventh in a recent BBC listener poll on the top ten essential musicals. It is now, 34 years after its London debut, running in Moscow, in a Russian translation, with “rewrites,” notes MetaFilter user Shakhmaty, “that humanize its KGB antagonist.”
Chess produced the hit “I Know Him So Well,” a duet by Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson that “held the Number One spot on the UK singles charts for 4 weeks and won the Ivor Novello Award as the Best Selling Single,” Ice the Site writes. A VHS video appeared in 1985 featuring the performers on the album singing that song and others from the show like “One Night in Bangkok” (above), which also became a “worldwide smash.”
Like Mamma Mia!, Chess is a medley, of sorts— in this case of musical styles rather than greatest pop hits. A contemporary New York Times review called the concept album “a sumptuously recorded… grandiose pastiche that touches half a dozen bases, from Gilbert and Sullivan to late Rodgers and Hammerstein, from Italian opera to trendy synthesizer-based pop, all of it lavishly arranged for the London Symphony Orchestra with splashy electronic embellishments.” Hear the full album the top of the post, read a summary of the show’s plot here, and see Tim Rice and ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus promote the show in 1986 on a British morning show just above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Powell’s Books Unveils a New Perfume That Smells Like Old Books
Missing the scent of used book stores during quarantine? Powell’s Books has you covered with their new unisex fragrance: “Like the crimson rhododendrons in Rebecca, the heady fragrance of old paper creates an atmosphere ripe with mood and possibility. Invoking a labyrinth of books; secret libraries; ancient scrolls; and cognac swilled by philosopher-kings, Powell’s by Powell’s delivers the wearer to a place of wonder, discovery, and magic heretofore only known in literature.” You can pre-order it here…
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Read More...Trips on the World’s Oldest Electric Suspension Railway in 1902 & 2015 Show How a City Changes Over a Century
Today we take a ride on the world’s oldest electric suspension railway—the Wuppertal Schwebebahn in Germany.
Actually, we’ll take two rides, traveling back in time to do so, thanks to YouTuber pwduze, who had a bit of fun trying to match up two videos discovered online for comparison’s sake.
The journey on the left was filmed in 1902, when this miracle of modern engineering was but a year old.
The train passes over a broad road traveled mostly by pedestrians.
Note the absence of cars, traffic lights, and signage, as well as the proliferation of greenery, animals, and space between houses.
The trip on the right was taken much more recently, shortly after the railway began upgrading its fleet to cars with cushioned seats, air conditioning, information displays, LED lighting, increased access for people with disabilities and regenerative brakes.
An extended version at the bottom of this page provides a glimpse of the control panel inside the driver’s booth.
There are some changes visible beyond the windshield, too.
Now, cars, buses, and trucks dominate the road.
A large monument seems to have disappeared at the 2:34 mark, along with the plaza it once occupied.
Fieldstone walls and 19th-century architectural flourishes have been replaced with bland cement.
There’s been a lot of building—and rebuilding. 40% of Wuppertal’s buildings were destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII.
Although Wuppertal is still the greenest city in Germany, with access to public parks and woodland paths never more than a ten-minute walk away, the views across the Wupper river to the right are decidedly less expansive.
As Benjamin Schneider observes in Bloomberg CityLab:
For the Schwebebahn’s first riders at the turn of the 20th century, these vistas along the eight-mile route must have been a revelation. Many of them would have ridden trains and elevators, but the unobstructed, straight-down views from the suspended monorail would have been novel, if not terrifying.
The bridge structures appear to have changed little over the last 120 years, despite several safety upgrades.
Those steampunk silhouettes are a testament to the planning—and expense—that resulted in this unique mass transit system, whose origin story is summarized by Elmar Thyen, head of Schwebebahn’s Corporate Communications and Strategic Marketing:
We had a situation with a very rich city, and very rich citizens who were eager to be socially active. They said, ‘Which space is publicly owned so we don’t have to go over private land?… It might make sense to have an elevated railway over the river.’
In the end, this is what the merchants wanted. They wanted the emperor to come and say, ‘This is cool, this is innovative: high tech, and still Prussian.’
At present, the suspension railway is only operating on the weekends, with a return to regular service anticipated for August 2021. Face masks are required. Tickets are still just a few bucks.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Watch Link Wray Play a Downright Dirty Version of “Rumble,” the Only Instrumental to Be Banned on Radio (1974)
It takes a lot of swagger and confidence to play a couple of barre chords on a guitar, look like the coolest cat doing so, and revolutionize rock music while doing so. That’s Link Wray we’re talking about, and the song is the 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble.” It still sounds fresh today for the same reasons it was controversial at the time. It sounds sleazy, grungy, dirty. This is a song for a pool hall, or a biker bar, and just reeks of cigarettes and liquor. And from Pulp Fiction onwards, the song has popped up in many movies and TV shows, giving a scene a bit of cool danger.
The above video is from a one-hour gig that Wray and his band performed at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, 1974, the former ice skating rink that promoter Bill Graham turned into one of the primo music venues of its day. And Link Wray playing was like one of the gods of rock descending to anoint the crowd. Presley–though Wray defended him during his act–had dropped out of mainstream culture. The original rock and rollers, Wray’s peers, were either dead or nostalgia acts. So this appearance is magical, rock spirit made flesh, looking dangerous and sexual in all his swagger.
That swagger was well earned. Fred Lincoln Wray was born in North Carolina to a Shawnee mother, as a Cherokee and White father had returned from WWI with PTSD. In the mostly Black neighborhood where he grew up, he would hide underneath the bed when the Ku Klux Klan would come through on a terror campaign. “Elvis, he grew up — I don’t want to sound racist when I say this — he grew up white man poor,” Wray said in an interview. “I was growing up Shawnee poor.”
He suffered weak eyesight and bad hearing from childhood measles, and later when he served time in the army, he’d contract tuberculosis, lose one lung, and was told he wouldn’t have a singing career.
But he did have his guitar skills, which he’d learned as a child from a traveling Black guitarist called Hambone. Back from the army he formed a group with his brothers Vernon and Doug, and was going by the name Lucky. They gigged around Virginia and Washington, DC, and were asked by a local promoter to come up with a song similar to The Diamonds’ “The Stroll.” What they came up with was an instrumental called “Oddball.” It was a hit played live but when they went into a studio to record a demo, it just didn’t have “that sound”. Wray started punching holes in his speakers with a pencil and in one stroke created the fuzztone guitar sound.
The big labels wouldn’t bite, but Cadence Records’ Milt Grant said yes. Or rather, his teenage stepdaughter and her friends said yes, and Milt put aside his own distaste. Juvenile delinquents were at once both a “problem” and a way to sell product, especially with the hit musical and movie West Side Story. “Rumble” was a much better name than “Oddball,” and, on March 31, 1958, it was released.
Some DJs refused to play the single in cities where teenage gang violence was a problem. When Wray and his band played American Bandstand, Dick Clark didn’t mention the title. It didn’t stop the single from being a hit.
And it was influential. Wray pretty much invented power-chord riffing, and influenced Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Neil Young, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, and countless others. Curmudgeon-genius Mark E. Smith of the Fall named him as one of the only two musicians he respected (the other was Iggy Pop).
Link Wray’s Cherokee and Shawnee heritage was not well known among the general public, but the recent documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World brought the influence of Native American musicians out into the open for celebration, connecting Link Wray with Robbie Robertson, Charlie Patton, Mildred Bailey, and Stevie Salas.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
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