‘Rumble’: the only instrumental song ever banned from radio
Despite the fact that we live in an age where many of the World’s Worst Men are always using the media landscape to cry about how they’ve been ‘cancelled’, it’s actually never been easier for anyone to build a platform for themselves and to share their thoughts, and of course, their art, with the world. In the age of Tik-Tok and streaming, bands don’t even necessarily need a label anymore to make waves in the music world, let alone something as antiquated as radio airplay.
However, way back before streaming CEOs Tim Cook and Daniel Ek were even born, the radio was a crucial component in breaking it big in the music business. Everyone owned a radio, and if you could get your latest single regularly spinning on the airwaves, then everyone could be your audience.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Radio DJs were the real rockstars of their times and had the power to make or break a certain act by playing the right song at the right time. One such celebrity DJ was Dewey Phillips, who worked at the WHBQ in Memphis, Tennessee, hosting the Red, Hot & Blue radio show. On July 7th, 1954, Phillips introduced the world to a new singer by the name of Elvis Presley and a brand new sound in the form of ‘That’s All Right’. Not only did Philips like the song so much, but so did the listeners, who phoned up in huge numbers to demand he play the song again. And again. Philips gave in and played the song a further 13 times over the remainder of that night’s show.
In a true showing of early cancel culture, the establishment had quickly realised that the reaction Elvis was eliciting from his audience could spell trouble for the status quo and established order, and so they tried to minimise his influence right away. His television appearances were censored, and he was threatened with jail time if he continued to dance the way he did on stage. It wasn’t long before he found himself drafted and sidelined from the full glare of the media at the height of both his fame and his influence. His music might have revolutionised rock and roll with its potent and youthful energy, wild abandon and the lifeblood of freedom that ran all the way through it, but it also caused the industry to take a closer look at, and listen to, all the racket the young punks were making.
Around the same time that Elvis was being shipped off to Germany, Link Wray was taking up arms in the fight against the old ways and established order himself. His weapon of choice was a red Gibson SG Standard and a Multivox Premier 71 amplifier, with the distortion turned all the way up to the max.
Elvis may have had his debut single played 14 times in one night in 1954, but just four short years later, Link Wray and His Wray Men couldn’t even get their own debut, ‘Rumble’, played out over the airwaves in certain states even once. The song was banned from being played on the radio for fear it would incite violence in any young listener who heard it. Despite being an all-instrumental piece—and it remains the only instrumental piece of music to ever be banned from the radio—there were fears that the title was a reference to the slang term used for gang fighting and that the stabbing, chaotic, frenetic and distorted guitar sounds would encourage juvenile delinquency and disorder.
And while Wray couldn’t find his way onto the radio with the song, his live audiences had proven they were really ready to go wild for it. Composing the piece on the spot at a live show in early 1958, the song that Wray and his Wray Men came up with went down so well that the crowd demanded they play it over and over again before they let them leave the stage.
The crowd that night weren’t the only ones who liked what they heard. Radio executives across the country may have barred their DJs from playing the vicious and violent instrumental piece, but that didn’t stop fans from racing to their nearest record stores and buying up enough copies to send the single to Number 16 in the pop charts. Among them was a young Bob Dylan, who later went on to proclaim that the song was “the best instrumental ever” and also inspired such later so-called Rock Gods as Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.
