Crawdaddy Stumbles on Seminal Rock ‘n Roll History.
The Green Door. One More Night Without Sleeping!
Jim Lowe rode this catchy refrain to claim a bouncy top 40 hit in 1956. Today, boisterous laughter pulls me toward this tightly closed portal. The funky green paint jumps out in my Nikon viewfinder. Guitar riffs punctuated by high pitched cackles present a mysterious milieu. Suddenly, the three most famous power chords in rock ‘n roll history blow me back from the tightly closed green door.
Inside, a solid guitar man offers up the first three unmistakable notes of Link Wray’s Rumble. They changed forever the evolution of guitar playing. Now, they are seriously rattling my jaw fillings.
I peeked through the wrought iron border around the green entrance. A bearded dude was caressing a classic Stratocaster. The ground was littered with spent beer cans and cigarette butts. He has been right here for awhile. His vacant gaze suddenly found me peering sheepishly around the green door. “This is for Bob”, he observed softly. “He knew all there is to know about my old man.”
Now, I am no rock ‘n roll historian, but I was privileged to hear Link Wray pound out his pioneering guitar sound in the Southern Maryland of my youth. I even showed up unannounced at his family farm in Accokeek to pop a cold brew with him. This unidentified player before me bore more than a passing resemblance to the young Link that I had venerated. But who the hell was Bob?And was this shaggy guy Link’s middle aged son serving up a drunken homage to his dead father? The mystery player then offered me a cryptic clue. “Bob remembered Dad even though he was playing in London,” he whispered in a distant, raspy voice. Well! Now I recalled a very cool story.
Bob Dylan had just days before this won the Nobel prize for literature. There were plaudits aplenty, but the immortal troubadour was also catching hell from some jealous, prominent literati who resented his being dubbed the greatest poet of his generation. Bobby was, in effect, hijacking a precious in house award supposedly reserved just for them.
My mind then flashed back a few more years to when I first heard Wray had passed away in Copenhagen. Dylan was playing in London on his never ending tour. Bob & his band walked out to open the show and they stood stock still on stage in heads bowed silence. Bob then gave a nod to lead guitarist, Charley Sexton, and they belted out those three immortal power chords from my youth. The audience briefly roared, but just as quickly they fell respectfully stone silent. For ten momentous minutes, the hall shook as the sullen crowd was rocked by one distorted power chord after another. Rumble washed over the hushed audience like the eulogy it was.
Now his critics not withstanding, the one thing often missed about Dylan is his encyclopedic knowledge about music and musicians. He knew that Wray had enjoyed considerable success in the UK. He didn’t need to break his customary on stage silence to offer up an epitaph. This once acoustic folkie just played it dead straight as a now legendary electric eclectic. He made damn sure everyone paused to remember Link Wray that night with the language they all shared—the hard driving, fuzzy power chord. He would repeat this respectful ritual to open his next three concerts.
On this humid Sunday morning in North Carolina, I peered by pure chance around this tightly closed green door to find an enthralling slice of rock ‘n roll history. Dylan would continue make millions on the way to immortality; Wray would finally get his just due in a big American film documentary; and Jim Lowe would remain the obscure answer to a trivia question about “the green door.”
For Link Wray, the guitar was both an instrument and a perceived weapon. Rumble was mostly banned from radio play in the late 1950’s. It still reached number 16 in the US, largely by word of mouth. My own mother barred Wray and Jerry Lee Lewis permanently from our home. Their music was thought to harbor a pernicious virus that spread juvenile delinquency. Aggressive quarantine would surely assure that this pestilence would be short lived But Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, The Rolling Stones, and the Beatles recognized Link Wray for what he was—never a real threat to society but a pioneer, rock guitar innovator.
