Packin' Up, Shackin' Up
This summer's Link-iversaries: His self-titled album turns 50, plus the 64th anniversary of 'Rumble.'
Hi, and welcome to the ~summer~ edition of Switchblade.
I was going to wait until fall to send out another newsletter, then I realized that the summer has some very important Link anniversaries that need to be commemorated. With a career as prolific as Link’s, there’s no rest for his biographer!
Book Updates
No new news this month. We’re now looking at a 2022 publish date for my Link biography. There are a lot of loose ends are being tied up and final revisions being made. Bazillion Points, my publisher, has a dedicated email list for the book that you can sign up for! That and this newsletter are the best way to find out about pre-orders, pub date announcements, events and everything else book-related when the time comes.
Back to the Chicken Shack
This June marked a big Link milestone: 50 years since Link Wray, his gorgeous and joyful 1971 LP, came out on Polydor Records. It can’t be overstated how influential Link Wray was, and still is. Everyone from Father John Misty to the Neville Brothers has covered its songs and it’s been reissued several times. In addition to marking a comeback for Link, the LP kicked off an era that Link fans often call “the shack years.”
There are multiple chapters devoted to the shack years in my book. This era is its own little microcosm of Link’s complex life and career. Remember how I wrote a couple months ago on Link’s birthday about his Bullshot album, the year he turned 50 and how he always seemed to resist both letting go of his past and moving forward? The shack years also marked a similarly important transition period.
In 1971, Link was 42. Jaded from his years in the music business, he had halted touring and wasn’t releasing a ton of new music, sticking mainly to gigs in D.C. and at the redneck bars he knew along the 301 strip (known as “Little Vegas”—interesting story and pictures of it here) in southern Maryland. He married his second wife in the mid-1960s and had three children with her, but in 1969 the woman who would later become Link’s third wife (with whom he eventually moved to Arizona) gave birth to their daughter, Rhonda. To say that he was caught between two worlds would be putting it lightly.
In 1970, a producer named Steve Verroca went to see Link in one of these bars where he was playing “human jukebox,” finally coaxing him back in the studio. The studio in question? A chicken shack. Link’s brother Ray had given up his studio in D.C. and moved his recording business to a three-acre plot in rural Accokeek, Maryland—first in the house’s basement, then in a converted ramshackle outbuilding that at one time had been a poultry coop. Thus, the “shack years.”
The recordings that Link, Verroca, Ray and their associates made during this time became a trio of albums: 1971’s Link Wray, 1972’s Mordicai Jones (released under the pseudonym Mordicai Jones) and 1973’s Beans and Fatback. “Rumble” had put Link on the map as a guitar god in 1958, but these homespun LPs proved that he was every bit as good a singer, lyricist and songwriter. Stomping feet and shaken cans of nails served as the percussion. The piano was out of tune thanks to a leaky roof. But the shack recordings were anything but amateur. While each shack album is a unique creation with its own idiosyncrasies and backstories, they all share a similar feel: sophisticated yet down-home comfort music, made DIY-style with friends and family.
Link Wray is arguably the brightest of the bunch. It’s also the most autobiographical, with Link’s newly introspective lyrics evoking his childhood (“Black River Swamp”), revealing his feelings about classism and racism (“Ice People”) and the 1970 Kent State shooting (“Fallin’ Rain”), and reveling in his faith (“La De Da,” “Take Me Home Jesus”). His voice, hoarse and strained from losing a lung due to tuberculosis in the mid-’50s, gives a charming fallibility. I always liken Link Wray to George Harrison’s Dark Horse album, which Harrison recorded with laryngitis: a singer clearly struggling so hard that it makes the words seem even more urgent when they do come out.
A few years ago, I wrote an article about Link’s Shawnee identity and how it overlapped with Link Wray for Indy Week. Indigenous writer Nick Martin recently published a really nice essay in the same publication about the album’s 50th anniversary. In it, Martin juxtaposes Link’s experiences with his own tribal community and upbringing in Link’s native North Carolina. I highly recommend giving it a read.
The problem that Wray encountered in his first four decades navigating a colonial society was that the American entertainment industries had little use or patience for a Native artist who desired to be themselves, let alone tap into their gospel roots. —Nick Martin
While “Rumble” certainly got—demanded—people’s attention, many fans connect emotionally with Link Wray. In fact, back in 2014 when I was debating writing a proposal to try to sell this book, it was “God Out West” that spoke to me one day and told me I had to. I’m not a religious person, but I took it as a sign.
What’s your favorite song from Link Wray? I’m always curious. People telling me their favorite song from this album is my own weird version of astrology.
64 Years of ‘Rumble’
Every year, I space on the anniversary of “Rumble” because July 12 also happens to be my kid’s birthday. (The ol’ brain apparently can only handle one epic event memory per day.)
This July marked the 64th anniversary of the night Link improvised “Odd Ball,” the song that would later become “Rumble,” at a record hop full of teenage fans in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The legend of how Link created the song on July 12, 1957 has become larger than life, with stories depicting everything from a crowd 12,000 strong (nope) to a full-blown riot (also nope). Even Link’s own version would vary depending on when, and to whom, he was telling it. The one consistent detail in Link’s yarns is that divine intervention was present that night. He always, always gave the lord the credit—claiming that his “Jesus God” “zapped” the song into him while he was on stage. (Of course you can read more of these stories in their full forms when the book when it comes out!)
Here he is in 1997 spinning one version of the story to an interviewer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The “Rumble” conversation starts at about 2:30.
A few months after the July 12 gig, “Odd Ball” was recorded and finally released on Cadence Records March 31, 1958 as “Rumble.” And the rest, as we know, is rock ‘n’ roll history.
Link’s Danelectro at SFO
I’ve been seeing some fun photos on Instagram of a surf rock/instrumental rock exhibit at terminal 2 of the San Francisco International Airport. Deke Dickerson—who detailed his quest for Link’s iconic Danelectro Longhorn guitar in his first Strat in the Attic book—is lending the guitar to the exhibit. Stop by and say hey to Link’s Longhorn for me if you happen to be passing through SFO! More info on the exhibit here.
Soundtrack to an Insurrection
Link’s haunting early ‘60s instrumental “Genocide” recently was used on an episode of On the Media discussing the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, six months later.
For those not in the United States, it’s difficult to express how chilling that day was: watching armed pro-Trump insurrectionists storm the Capitol and politicians running for their lives on TV, not yet understanding that some of those elected leaders were actually the ones who helped set it all in motion. Taking all that in while we were already trudging through election backlash, Covid, and grocery shopping and going about our business like normal, was so surreal. (I guess you’re just supposed to keep sending emails and attending Zoom meetings while there’s a literal gallows being built for the Vice President of the United States on the Capitol steps???) We knew that lives—and democracy itself—hung in the balance. And they still do. The danger felt so immediate, even from 1,000 miles away.
This is all my long-winded way of saying: the podcast producers really knocked it out of the park with the dramatic, dirge-y music choice. Bonus points if they picked it knowing that Link used to call Washington, D.C home.
Side note, does Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Danger Bird” not sound exactly like “Genocide”?
That’s all the Link news I have for now! Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll talk to you probably in September.
Dana