See the previous entries here:

Part 1
Part 2

Last week, we examined Johnny B. Goode and how that turned the world of music upside down and how it accompanied the changes in society and we even discussed how Americana influenced the world.

It was about that same time, the year was 1958 and this was just a couple of months later, that Link Wray released an instrumental known as Rumble.

If you examine the late 1950s, you’ll notice that we generally considered Johnny B. Goode to be, well, good. Rumble? Not so much.

Now, rock takes on an attitude. How much attitude? Well, it’s an instrumental. Go ahead, give it a listen:

There, you find just a few short chords and some bitchin’ solos. That’s all there is to it, right?

Of course not… If that was all there was to it, it’d not be on the list!

No, they banned that. Yup… It was banned by some stations in the United States. They banned that from radio! It was also one of the first songs to feature power chords, distortion, and made use of feedback. It’s from there that we’ve gained our association of those three traits as being ‘dark.’

This song sounded unlike anything else that had been heard at the time and it became associated with the gang culture that permeated the 1950s. As the title may indicate, it was pretty well associated with a rumble, or a fight between rival gangs that involved multiple people.

This is also notable because the way to get distortion back then was to simply poke holes in the speakers. Link Wray jammed a thumb through the speakers, much to the dismay of the studio that recorded the work.

Either way, this sound would come to be associated with the rock you know and love. It didn’t have the wide appeal of Johnny B. Goode, but it did have the notoriety of being banned from the airwaves and only being an instrumental.

The banning? Well, that only helped its popularity among the kind of people that the song was meant to speak to. It had initially been a live jam and the audience loved it so much that they made the band repeat it four times in a single night.

It should be noted that it wasn’t banned in every radio market, just some of them. The reasons for banning it usually were summed up as they believed the song prompted and glorified juvenile delinquency and that was just not something America was ready for in 1958!

But, the story of rock moves on and many have since given the song much acclaim. Those are the same tones you’re already intimately familiar with and that riff has since gone on to be mimicked and used for a variety of tasks. We will see you next week with our next installment of the history of Rock and Roll by way of the guitar riff.

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