By Michael Hann, The Guardian | You could get the measure of Duane Eddy – who has died aged 86 – from a selection of his album titles: Have “Twangy” Guitar Will Travel (1958, his debut), The “Twangs” the “Thang” (1959), $1,000,000.00 Worth of Twang (1960, with Volume 2 in 1962), Twistin’ ’n’ Twangin (1962), “Twangin’” Up a Storm (1963), The Biggest Twang of All (1966). Concentrate not on the eccentric use of quotation marks, but on the twang, because that’s what Eddy did. From 1958 to 1963 his guitar sound – a decade later, Melody Maker would call him “the first real guitar superstar of the rock and roll age” – was all over the charts in both the US and UK, inspiring countless hordes, before disappearing almost completely when the Beatles transformed pop music.Eddy’s sound was based on playing his lead lines on the bass strings of his guitar, then recording them in such a way that the echo and reverb was exaggerated. If he sounded as if he was playing inside a giant water tank, that was no accident: he was.
When he started recording at Audio Recorders in Phoenix, Arizona, with Lee Hazlewood as producer and co-writer in 1957, Hazlewood put him inside a giant water tank to use as an echo chamber. [Record in our own tank in Rangely, Colorado: https://www.thetanksounds.com if you want to replicate that sound!]
The result was a sound that took rock’n’roll guitar playing to a new and unheard place; Eddy’s playing on his Gretsch 6120 summoned the desert outside the city: vast and empty and unending. It didn’t sound like the humid, sexualised jitter of the rock’n’roll from the southern cities, but like the soundtrack to a trucker clocking up the miles in the glare, without another vehicle in sight. Yet his best records – Shazam!, Rebel Rouser, Peter Gunn, Cannonball, Ramrod and more – carried a sense of danger that rock’n’roll was starting to lose by the time of Eddy’s ascendancy. If his records were never as unhinged as, say Link Wray’s, then that made him palatable to the charts in a way Wray never was.
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I was greatly influenced by Mr. Eddy! Got to meet him in Nashville a few years back – go here to read the full story: