Quick note: This article is part of a series of narrative styled reviews of songs called “This Is...” Songs old, new, iconic, obscure. Anything worthy of revisiting. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.
You’re standing on a hilltop. Behind you everything is Norman Rockwell. Sunny sky and bluebirds chirping. But in front of you is something different. Something violently new. Clouds are starting to gather, and the singing of the birds is beginning to crack.
You feel a chill beginning to cover your whole body, so you go to turn back towards the old familiar daylight. But just as you do, you hear a commotion. Three loud bangs, maybe four. You convince yourself it’s just a vehicle backfiring, but the screams confirm it wasn’t.
Now you have no choice but to run down the other side of the hill and leave the comfort you once felt. You don’t know exactly what’s coming, but you’re on the precipice of a new decade. Change is in the air, and you can feel it.
This is Link Wray’s “Rumble,” released March 31st, 1958. It remains the only instrumental banned from the radio. It was banned for fear of it inciting gang violence, due its suggestive title and dark, brooding sound. The song has beat all odds against it. Today it is omnipresent. TV, movies, commercials, etc. Might as well be in the air we breathe. Even if you haven’t heard “Rumble,” you’ve heard “Rumble.”
As ridiculous as this is gonna read nowadays, I can actually see why it was banned, or at the very least, why the powers that be were worried about it. For having no lyrics, it is a very aggressive song. Even today that Dsus2, Dsus2, E progression can send a chill up the spine.
One thing you can’t argue when it comes to this song is that the timing was absolutely perfect. It’s positioned comfortably in the transition between the old guard and new guard. Little Richard was a preacher, Elvis had been shipped off to war, and yet there’s still four years before Bob Dylan and The Beatles would emerge. In a lot of ways it is a doorway between the pioneering 1950s and the creative explosion of the 1960s.
And not only was it musically prophetic, but also politically and socially. The difference between the 1950s and 1960s was night and day. Race riots, assassinations, war, and all of it being broadcast on television nationwide. There was so much turmoil that some actually consider the 60s the start of the decline of the American Empire. And to say you can’t hear this turmoil starting to bubble in “Rumble” is a lie.
If the main verse wasn’t enough to make you flip your lid, then the guitar solo would come in for the final blow. An all out assault on your senses. Imagine hearing this for the first time. The hardest thing you’ve heard up to this point is Jerry Lee Lewis, and this makes his banging on the piano sound like a lullaby.
You’ve just gone over the hill. You don’t know what’s coming, but you know you’ve just experienced something real. Something authentic. Something that cuts to the bone. And you know that whatever comes next, your leather jacket will protect you. This is Link Wray’s “Rumble.”
