Tank you for the music!
QUESTION Is it true that guitarist Duane Eddy’s record producer bought an enormous empty water tank to use as an echo chamber in order to enhance his ‘twangy’ sound?
He did, though there is some debate as to whether the tank was designed to store grain or water.
duane eddy, now 79, was a hugely successful instrumental rocker in his heyday, perhaps the man most responsible for popularising the electric rock guitar.
His distinctively low, twangy riffs could be heard on 19 Top 40 UK chart hits between 1958 and 1963. He sold 12 million records, including Rebel Rouser, Peter Gunn and Pepe.
The twangy sound was devised with producer Lee Hazlewood, an Arizona dJ whom eddy had met while hanging out at a radio station as a teenager.
Hazlewood was interested in experimental sound and production techniques. Looking for the perfect echo, he famously spent days visiting farms and yelling into metal storage tanks.
duane eddy cut the million- selling Rebel Rouser, the so-called ‘Twang Heard Around The World’, at Audio Recorders of Arizona in 1958.
Hazelwood recalled: ‘i went to Phoenix and told Floyd Ramsey: “We need an ultrasound room. We need that for new and better recordings.” To avoid high costs, i proposed to buy a tank where you stored grain. We went out and tried everything by shouting in it. Finally i found one that did what i wanted.
‘We paid 200 dollars and put this big cast iron grain tank in a corner of the lot with a four dollar mike at one end and a 60 cent speaker at the other.’
There does seem to be disagreement as to whether it was a grain or a water tank — it probably could have functioned as either.
According to eddy in a 2011 interview: ‘We didn’t have an echo chamber. Before i started we all went down to Salt River and found a 2,000-gallon water tank. We ran my guitar and the other instruments through it and it gave us the echo.’
Adrian DeVine, London SW4.
QUESTION Who was the author and what was the title of the poem that begins: ‘Two steps down and into the garden/ Through the gate and into the lane/ Nobody’s seen me/ I’m all by myself and out in the rain’?
iT iS called Out in The Rain and can be found in an anthology of children’s poems written by Marion St John Webb entitled The Littlest One. it was my favourite book when i was learning to read.
Marion was born in Hampstead, North London, on december 5, 1888. She was the daughter of the poet Arthur St John Adcock and Marion Louise Taylor.
She wrote poems for a series of fairy books, illustrated by the renowned Margaret Tarrant. The childhood they pictured was typical of the times, but is now regarded as rather sentimental. i think her work possesses an innocence, which is sadly lacking in children’s literature today. Marion had no children and died on May 2, 1930, aged 41. Here is the complete poem: Two steps down. An’ into the garden, Through the gate, An’ into the lane. Nobody’s seen me! Nobody’s seen me! All by myself I am out in the rain. Brown little puddles, The mud makes me slip, Rain from the willow trees, Drip, drip, drip. A little worm wriggles across
over there, And I laugh, an’ I’m runnin’ with rain
in my hair. Through the gate An’ back in the garden. Two steps up An’ into the hall. Nothin’ an’ nobody’s nice at all! Ros Richards. Worthing, West Sussex.
QUESTION Inhabitants of Leicester are called Rat-eyes, from the Roman name for the city, Ratae. What other inventive nicknames are there for towns and cities?
THe previous answer referred to the ‘Sand Grown ’Uns’ of Fylde, so called because most of Blackpool, St Annes and Lytham is built on sand. You have to go yards down to hit solid ground. A little further inland along the Fylde Coast the land is boggy and is constantly being drained. This area is called The Moss and its inhabitants are called Mossogs.
Keith Hallam, Preston.
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