Link Wray was years ahead of his time, wasnt he? Amazingly raw and aggressive and distorted for 1959
You don't really find much else with that sort of punk attack till 1964 with the kinks you really got me
for sure. my favorite era of his is the early 70s.
at that point he'd basically retired to be a farmer, but, after hearing the country/roots rock that was getting popular at the time, thought "hey i used to play stuff like that" and started recording new music a chicken shack on his brother’s property. a lot of anecdotes about that era give you a sense of the sound link and co. were going for: all the instruments getting tuned down to match the out of tune piano they had, putting the amp for link’s guitar like 30m away from the shack so it wasn’t deafeningly loud, and so on. family members of various skill levels hanging out and joining in (as used to be normal before the 20th century). saw a youtube comment from someone who said that, as a small child, they'd been sitting right next to drum set you can hear in one of these songs during its recording.
the results were critically panned, viewed as a disingenuous, character-breaking attempt to cash in on the hippie movement. but really wray had a stronger connection to the music he was playing than the hippies did. wray said of it, "In a way I couldn't care less if the [self-titled] album didn't sell a single copy. We're happy with it and we've done it our way."
the three albums from this period are really great imo. like a missing step between anthology of american folk music and d'angelo - voodoo, somehow. admittedly an eccentric way to frame it—but at any rate, these songs are about groove and atmosphere/attitude over all else. there’s a very backwoods quality to them, and you get that style that only people born a long time ago in the american south could play in, where the timing in each repetition of a phrase is slightly different. but to me, the punchier, more modern kick-and-snare-centric feel that eventually evolves into hip hop is also there. sometimes described as “mellow”or “soft” compared to his usual sound, but i don’t think that’s quite right. to me this music sounds hungry and focused. the songs get better and better the more attention you pay to them.
tbh i think wray himself was on his highest vibrational frequency during this era too. in the decades before and after he comes across as a complete teenager in spirit, for good and bad, but in some of these songs he seems almost like a wise old patriarch.
this is the best one. the only lyrics over like 6 minutes are “i can see the water boy… coming down the road”. evokes a long, hot day of manual work in a way.