Guitarist for whom “the twang was the thang”
Once described as “the first real guitar superstar of the rock’n’roll age”, Duane Eddy, who has died aged 86, emerged in the late 1950s, after the first flush of Elvis Presley’s fame, and his instrumental recordings dominated the charts on both sides of the Atlantic until the mid-1960s. He sold tens of millions of records, and pioneered a new sound, which was signalled in the names of his albums, said Michael Hann in The Guardian. His 1958 debut was called Have “Twangy” Guitar Will Travel, and was followed by The “Twangs” the “Thang” (1959), $1,000,000 Worth of Twang (1960), Twistin’ ’N’ Twangin’ (1962), “Twangin’” Up a Storm! (1963), and The Biggest Twang of Them All (1966). Twang, he once said, was “a silly name for a non-silly thing”. A low, “otherwordly” sound, it was characterised by heavy bass and reverb; and if it could seem as if Eddy was playing inside a giant water tank, “that was no accident”. He and his producer, Lee Hazlewood, had salvaged one from a junk yard, and used it as a rudimentary echo chamber.
For many of those who became teenagers in that period, Eddy’s electric guitar tracks – Rebel Rouser (1958), Forty Miles of Bad Road (1959), Peter Gunn (1959) – evoked a whole American landscape. “Twang came to represent a walk on the wild side, late 1950s-style: the sound of revved-up hotrods, of rebels with or without a cause, an echo of the wild west on the frontier of rock’n’roll,” wrote Michael Hill, when Eddy was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. And though “the British invasion” ended his run of hits, his work had a profound influence on everyone from The Shadows and The Beatles (notably on Day Tripper) to Blondie (Atomic), Bruce Springsteen (Born to Run), Chris Isaak and Ennio Morricone.
Duane Eddy was born in 1938 in Corning, New York, where his father drove a bread truck. He first picked up a guitar aged five. The family moved to Arizona when he was 13 and, a few years later, he left school to play in bars with the musician Al Casey, who became a member of his first backing band, The Rebels. Soon he had developed his technique of playing lead lines on the bass strings, to produce the “twang”, and met Hazlewood, who shepherded him to chart success. The rockabilly revival in the 1970s led to renewed interest in his work, said The New York Times and, in the 1980s, he collaborated with the British synth-pop band Art of Noise on a new cover of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme tune, which won a Grammy in 1987. In the 1990s, Rebel Rouser was on the soundtrack to the film Forrest Gump, and The Trembler, his collaboration with Ravi Shankar, was used in Natural Born Killers. A self-effacing, good-humoured man, Eddy once suggested that his greatest contribution to music had been “not singing”.