Link Wray - Early Recordings

“This Ace album has it all. If you only have to have one Link Wray album this is it.” - Bobby Gillespie

Listening to this record gives me the same feeling as Ritchie Valens’ brilliant instrumental ‘From Beyond’ – recorded in 1958, the same year ‘Rumble’ was released: the sense of electricity discovered and unchained. The electric guitar, once highlighted and harnessed to an unvarying, minimalist beat, turned into a sound of such melodic brutality that it appeared to embody all the existential threat of early rock’n’roll: the sound of the repressed – in these two cases Mexican Americans and Native Americans – seizing their moment and their place in the sun.

That’s a lot to load onto a series of brief, catchy instrumentals but there is a power in these records that goes beyond the simple desire to have a hit or even have some product you can sell at gigs. The Valens track was a one-off – who knows whether or not he’d have pursued this route if he had lived – but Link Wray continued to make haunting, tough, lean and mean records until 1966 that at once moved with the times, ‘Batman Theme’ for one, but also stayed close to that founding sense of marginality and danger.