‘Rumble’: The song so good that it made Pete Townshend “very uneasy”
The Who had a serious reputation back in the day. With Keith Moon’s animalistic playing, Pete Townshend’s violent guitar shredding and the various tales of the group smashing up hotel rooms and terrorising venues, they were rock’s wildest rulers. So you would have thought that Townshend would be a tough one to rattle, but one song managed it, being so good that he admitted to feeling “uneasy”.
Of course, “uneasy” could mean a lot of things. There are songs that manage to be genuinely scary, tinged with a kind of uncanny horror that makes headphones itch with suspense or fear. There are songs so sad that they can unsettle your gut, sending waves of emotion coursing through the body. There are songs so long and so powerful that bones rattle and ears ring. Each type could be described as fostering a sense of “unease”.
But for Townshend, it seemed that one song left him feeling uncertain as it opened up a new path in front of him, one he’d walk down and change his life: the path to music making. While it might be expected that the song that made him first pick up a guitar would be some iconic rock track or a cut from a blues master. It was instead a simple instrument but a deeply effective one.
The track is ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray, the American guitarist and songwriter who sent shockwaves through music with that sub-three-minute track. Though simply made, crafted from little more than some chords and a drum keeping time, it’s the sound itself that was so pioneering. ‘Rumble’ is one of the earliest recordings to use distortion, giving it a warbling and atmospheric feel that many had never heard or felt before.
Young Townshend was amongst them. “I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard ‘Rumble’ and yet very excited by the guitar sound,” he said of the song. It was a sort of fascinated confusion. His uneasiness seemed to come from curiosity, wanting to know what that sound was, how it could be made and how it could make a person feel that way. There was power in that, and Townshend wanted it for himself. From that point on, he followed Wray into music.
“If it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble’, I would have never picked up a guitar,” Townshend said later, laying his entire career at the feet of this one short song. Wray appeared as an icon and a major inspiration that stuck around as the guitarist said, “He is the king”.
But this isn’t an isolated experience. Despite being a humble track in terms of form and length, the impact of ‘Rumble’ and its use of distortion was huge, with Townshend not being the only musician to be deeply affected by it. Iggy Pop was another musician who was left feeling uneasy from the track, though his experience was less complimentary. “There was a guy named Link Wray,” he said, “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’.”
But there can’t be any coincidence that two icons of rock heard this same track and were greatly impacted by it. Whether they liked the track or not, the effect of Wray’s playing and the use of his strange guitar sounds seemed to birth a sensation, sticking in the mind of two infamously wild musicians as if it left them both in a strange hypnosis of musical turmoil.
