How Elmore James’ guitar playing was the first wave of punk
Punk has transcended mere musical classification, embodying a rebellious ethos that challenges societal norms and champions individuality. Long before the iconic aesthetic of safety pins and spiked hair emerged, punk’s essence was rooted in defiance, rejecting conformity and mainstream expectations. In the early days of rock and roll, artists like Elmore James epitomised this spirit through their raw, blues-infused expression, paving the way for the disruptive energy that would come to define punk culture.
Then again, all good rock and roll has been indebted to the blues. Whether that’s Chuck Berry plucking out a standard I-IV-V progression or Led Zeppelin covering the great blues artists of old, the best rock songs have been known to take the blues and infuse it with a healthy dose of attitude whenever they played.
Before Berry had even sung about a kid looking to play his guitar like ringing a bell, James had been trying to make his guitar speak for years. Born in the kind of music scenes that fostered early rock and roll, he had studied under some of the best, having been taught a handful of licks from blues legend Robert Johnson.
Taking the basis of his blues knowledge, James knew that the best way to get everyone to pay attention to him would be to crank his amp as loud as he could. Whereas artists like BB King and Muddy Waters were applauded for the amount of taste that they put into their bends, James wanted to create the kind of music that hit the listener in their gut as well as their eardrums, eventually putting broad arrangements behind him as he played slide guitar.
Throughout his career, James wanted his setup to sound “louder than God”, always adding different extensions to his rig whenever he got the chance. While his versions of songs like ‘Dust My Broom’ would be modest hits in their time, James would never get his just due until the next generation heard what he had to offer.
When combing through the blues licks that they loved as kids, The Rolling Stones would idolise James’s work, with Brian Jones eventually using him as the blueprint for how he wanted his guitar to sound. Although James would later get namechecked by artists like The Beatles in their blues romp, ‘For You Blue’, the mindset behind his setup was what kept audiences coming back.
Outside of the major rock and rollers of the 1960s, many guitarists were interested in pushing their volume even further, wanting to match the sound of that sonic thunder that James achieved. From there, artists like The Stooges and Blue Cheer started to push their amplifiers to the max whenever they played live, making songs that used white noise almost like an instrument in its own right.
While the concerned parents of the world thought that it was nothing but mindless noise, artists like Black Sabbath and Ramones were just on the horizon, each of them taking the gigantic sounds of their favourite bands and blowing them up to create their respective genres. James may have just wanted to make the kind of music that made people’s hairs stand on end, but his approach to the blues gave birth to both punk and metal without really trying.
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