Though it only made #16 on the charts in 1958, Link Wray’s “Rumble“ holds a special place in my heart (and not just for its iconic status). I was born in DC, and grew up in Maryland, close by. When I was between the ages of about four and ten, my barber was a gentle, unassuming man named Doug, who owned Doug’s Barbershop in Waldorf. His last name was Wray, he was Link’s brother, and the drummer on Rumble (and most of Link Wray’s music for most of his career). I only discovered this fact a few years ago when I brought up the song at a holiday dinner only to hear my dad say, “Yeah, and the guy who cut your hair when you were a little boy was the drummer on that track.”

After the band’s halcyon days, Doug “retired” from music (do you ever really retire from music?) and opened the barbershop, which he ran pretty much right up until his death in 1985. Doug was a hell of a drummer—they once played a show at a used car lot in Waldorf and people could hear the drums three miles away (apparently someone reported “gun shots” to the police, who tracked the sound to the used car lot, and Doug Wray’s drumming).

By the way, the Wikipedia article linked above is a little inaccurate. The song was performed in Fredericksburg, VA for the first time, but “hot-miked” (Ray Vernon Wray, Link’s other brother, jammed the microphone he’d been singing into right into one of the amps), which produced that really loud, distorted, buzzy sound that hadn’t been heard outside of basements and bedrooms with busted, cheap ass amplifiers of a certain vintage.

Link had a practice “studio” (usually called “The Three Track Shack”) in Accokeek, MD., where I grew up (about five miles south of DC). The studio didn’t have the best equipment, so when they later practiced Rumble, as it came to be called (the song was originally called Oddball), that trademark proto-grunge sound was still there, a result of some pretty blown high-end response. When they went to record it at Cameo Records in Philadelphia, (the song was eventually picked up by Cadence, in NYC, release number 1347), they couldn’t quite get the sound right. Link solved the problem by walking around the studio with a pen, stabbing holes in tweeters (but leaving the woofers unmolested) until the guitar sounded about right.

Link would have been seventy-nine today.