“It sounded baaaad”: The anthem that made Pete Townshend pick up a guitar
The Who’s windmilling hero, Pete Townshend, put it pretty succinctly: “Rock ‘n’ roll may not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” It’s a pithy little quote that amounts to tomes. With only 17 words The Who legend distilled the history of a cultural movement down to a single sentence.
The original blues pioneers propagated the art form as a way to push through exultant liberation despite the problems surrounding them—from the damning history page of the plantations, something truly freeing was formed. Townshend himself has picked up that very mantle. How can you listen to something like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and have a single care left in this whole damn world?
“When I grew up,” Townshend once said, “what was interesting for me was that music was colour and life was grey. So, music for me has always been more than entertainment.” Townshend didn’t just recognise the beauty of music when he was growing up; he also seized upon its importance. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band. He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy,” he told Apple Music.
Adding: “Music even today is about much more than that. It has a function which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us.” One song, in particular, inspired Townshend to chase down that elixir. That track was Link Wray’s epic ‘Rumble’.
It was Iggy Pop who once said, “There was a guy named Link Wray,” Iggy Pop begins, “I heard this music in the student union at a university. It was called ‘Rumble’ and it sounded baaad. I left school emotionally at the moment I heard ‘Rumble’.” Townshend seconded its perturbing power when heralding the track in an interview: “I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard ‘Rumble’, and yet very excited by the guitar sound.”
Adding on another occasion, “He is the king, if it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble’, I would have never picked up a guitar.” This inspiring notion of shaking up the daily malaise with sheer sound is something that has always stayed with Townshend. One fateful night in 1970, he even got to thank his hero personally.
“Link is a quiet man to meet,” he explained, “easy and courteous. His music, though, betrays that deep inside, he gets very, very mean very often.”
This is the sordid sense of attitude that stirred up a generation. But he also had the chops to boot. As Townshend continues: “And his voice! He sounds like a cross between Jagger and Van Morrison, even sometimes like Robbie Robertson.” ‘Rumble’ might be instrumental, but somehow that welter of rock ‘n’ roll adjacencies can still be felt.
The story behind the song is cast in legend, too. Apparently, Link Wray was playing at some sort of fare in an early incarnation of his known as The Ray Men. A DJ asked his band to play ‘The Stroll’ by The Diamonds, Link Wray agreed, but having never heard of the song, he and his bandmates found themselves in a sink or swim predicament. Thus, in a glorious ratification of the old adage of ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, if you wanted to be bold, you could easily declare that the necessity of invention spawned one of the most influential cornerstones in rock history.
Wray’s brother, Doug, who, according to various corroborated reports, sounds like a sticksmith who drummed louder than a hurricane passing over a rattle factory, beat out a rhythm with the wrong end of his sticks. Wray strummed out a few heavy, sustained vibrato-laden chords, which is how he imagined a song called ‘The Stroll’ to sound (it doesn’t), and the rest is ancient history.
In order to hear the guitar over the pounding beat that Doug was mercilessly concocting, a microphone was placed in front of the punctured amplifier, and the blown-out sound caused a frenzy amid the exhilarated crowd as they basked in a sonic boom that would later become known as ‘Rumble’. Although the song would weave its own mystic journey thereafter, even becoming the first instrumental track to be banned, it was eventually foisted upon the world in 1958, and it has been blowing minds and amps ever since; Pete Townshend’s included.
