Link Wray & The Raymen
Mr. Guitar

On November 5, one year ago, we lost the king of guitar, LINK WRAY, who was 76 years old, due to a heart attack. He had just finished a 40-date tour in the U.S.A.

Born in North Carolina to a family of Native American origin, he formed his first band with his brother at the age of 13. A few years later, during military service, he contracted tuberculosis, leading to the removal of a lung and subsequently forcing him to abandon singing and focus exclusively on the guitar. In 1958, he formed his true band called "LINK WRAY & THE RAYMEN," in which his brothers Doug and Vernon Wray also played. From then on began the legend of "Mr. Fuzz," among the most revolutionary guitarists of all time, on par with Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, and the leading figure of instrumental surf garage, laying the foundations for Hard Rock and Punk.

Link Wray was the first to experiment with aggressive and threatening sounds, to the point where legend has it that he created the sound later called fuzz by puncturing his amplifier's cones with a pencil. In the same year, he recorded his first hit, "Rumble," a rock instrumental with a sound so menacing and dark for the time that it was banned from radio stations. It was the first time an instrumental was censored, a similar situation that would occur 8 years later to THE SONICS with their debut single "The Witch."

Despite this snag, "Rumble" went on to sell a million and a half copies, and many critics would define it as the greatest rock instrumental of all time. Quentin Tarantino would adopt it for the soundtrack of the cult movie Pulp Fiction. With "Rawhide" in 1959, he replicated the success of the previous year. His compositions were so ahead of their time that they were rediscovered only twenty years later, with the Garage Punk wave of the early '80s with Cramps, Fuzztones, and Guitar Wolf leading the charge, but the list is too long, so I want to add Melvins and Mudhoney.

Mr. Guitar is a double anthology that showcases all the classics of this fantastic composer, and besides the aforementioned "Rumble" and "Rawhide", it features authentic gems like "Jack the Ripper, Aces of Spades, Run Chicken Run, The Fuzz, Mustang", and others.

I recommend this album to everyone, not just fans of Garage but also of Blues, as Wray was also a great interpreter of Blues sounds. I would close with a statement from Pete Townshend of The Who:

"LINK WRAY is the king, if it hadn’t been for him and Rumble, I would have never picked up a guitar".

GOODBYE LINK, YOU WERE AND ALWAYS WILL BE THE GREATEST.