h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I saw Dick Dale a year or so back at a rock club in Houston, Texas - good show, with lots of "Dickheads" in attendance, shirts, caps and all. The club owner walked up to my group and mentioned the fact that Dick's guitar had extra heavy strings, something like barbed wire fencing, possibly without the barbs.

I recall another name involved in distortion, Link Wray, and his big hit, "Rumble" (hear a sample at Amazon.com). As the story goes, he also wanted a "rougher" sound from the guitar/amp, but he took a little "lower tech" approach - via punching holes in the speaker cone with a nail. I don't think he sold this secret, either, so don't let it out

Heh! I hadn't heard that one about Link Wray. It might have actually been borne from economics as well ... counter-intuitively, punching holes in the speaker cone of an amp probably didn't shorten it's life all that much. Not as much as cranking it all the way up, anyway! It sure puts Wray's "Rumble" into perspective, though. Thanks for the info. Now I'm going to have to try that with one of my cheaper speakers and see if I can get that sound ...

For those who are not familiar with Link Wray's "Rumble", you can get a taste from Amazon where there is a short sample you can hear. One of the reviewers described Wary as "where rude guitar comes from".

I love Rumble.... though the story I heard was that it was a pencil in the speakers... and I also heard that it was out of anger that he couldn't get the sound. Also, I belive the song was banned on the radio for a while due to the violent nature. Times have changed, eh?

Times have changed, indeed ... violence seems to have become the norm for much of pop, a la Eminem, etc. But the Kingsmen thought censorship worked to their advantage, "When the FBI investigates your song, the sales go way up." ("Louie, Louie" for you youngsters, which the FBI decided was "unintelligible at any speed".)

I always loved that story too... has anyone here seen the exhibit at Seattle's EMP about it?

No, I was in Seattle some years ago but don't recall the "EMP". What is it? The exhibit is about "Louie, Louie"?

I attended Rice Universtiy here in Houston, Texas, USA a thousand years ago, and their "Marching Owl Band" (MOB) has used "Louie, Louie" as their theme song for years. As marching bands go, the MOB is ... unconventional. They are probably the only marching band to have the plug pulled on their performance in the Astrodome, after a bit with the announcer saying, "The Houston Astros! First in your hearts, and last in the National League." At which point the management turned the mike off, leaving the rest of the band's humorous bits to the imagination of the crowd.

THe EMP was only complete a few years ago by Paul Allen (the ex-Microsoft guy)... it was origonally just gonna be a hendrix museum, but they made it a music museum instead. It's really quite amazing... they have incredible stuff there, like the entire woodstock setup from the band of gypsies.

It's been quite a while since I re-visited this thread, but I always wondered where I'd heard the story of speaker mutilation for the benefits of a fuzz tone or some amount of distortion. I finally found a pretty definitive reference that said it was Kink's guitarist Dave Davies that sliced up a speaker cone on his amp with a razor and stuck pins in it for their hit "You Really Got Me."

I'm certainly not trying to start a "whodunit first" argument, but I was fascinated by the fact that I'd heard about intentional speaker mutilation but had not associated it with either Wray's sound or the Kink's, both acts of whom I am a big fan. Ahhh, the pioneer's of hard rock.

- JD