Remembering Duane Eddy (1938-2024)

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Remembering Duane Eddy (1938-2024)

Duane Eddy (April 26, 1938 – April 30, 2024) was an American guitarist. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he had a string of hit records produced by Lee Hazlewood which were noted for their characteristically “twangy” guitar sound, including “Rebel-‘Rouser“, “Peter Gunn“, and “Because They’re Young“.

He had sold 12 million records by 1963. His guitar style influenced the Ventures, the Shadows, the Beatles (particularly lead guitarist George Harrison), Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, and Marty Stuart.

Eddy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Musician’s Hall of Fame and Museum in 2008.

It’s indisputable that Duane Eddy was one of the first guitar heroes of rock and roll. In the liner notes for Twang Thang: The Duane Eddy Anthology, Rhino’s definitive two-disc compilation from 1993, Dan Forte claimed that “Rebel Rouser,” the guitarist’s smash hit from 1958, “pretty much single-handedly established the institution of the guitar hero,” placing the instrument at the forefront of rock at a time when the powerful pianos of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were as exciting as a guitar of six strings saturated. Eddy never sang, a real rarity among rockers in the late 50s, which did not prevent his popularity in those early days of rock and roll. His twang (the name he gave to the low, reverberating noise he generated with his Gretsch guitar) was as distinctive and memorable as Elvis Presley’s pleas or Buddy Holly’s hiccups, an achievement somehow more remarkable due to the fact that he found his voice through a combination of wood, wire, and electronics.

Eddy’s influence was as deep and vast as the sound of his guitar, resonating across the decades and spanning genres. Forget the legions of surf rockers and hot rod aficionados that sprang up in the immediate aftermath of their string of Top Ten hits in the 50s.

George Harrison based his clean, economical style on Eddy and Bruce Springsteen, powering “Born to Run” with a resonant riff that sounded like something out of “Rebel Rouser”. Long before vibrato levers and pedals became tools of the trade, Eddy figured out how to manipulate his sound using Bigsby’s vibratos and studio effects, the first step toward pyrotechnics for Jimi Hendrix and his disciples. What’s more, the albums he released with Jamie —many produced by Lee Hazlewood; Eddy forged his career as much as Hazlewood forged the guitarist’s—they showed a sonic imagination as vivid as Phil Spector”s, but much easier to recreate cheaply.

That’s the thing about Duane Eddy’s exploits with the guitar: Unlike Chuck Berry’s two-note blues bends, it’s not hard to mimic Eddy’s one-note sequences. They are riffs that are learned shortly after picking up a guitar for the first time. That simplicity is rare among guitar heroes, especially those who arrived during the British Invasion that marginalized Eddy from pop, relegating him to a relic of the great rise of rock and roll.

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Duane Eddy “Rebel Rouser”

Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show. July 19, 1958.

Those early hits — “Rebel Rouser,” “Ramrod,” “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” “Peter Gunn,” and “Moovin” & Groovin,” among others — were still present during the 1960s thanks to that unfathomable metallic sound, that rumbling echo cannon that resonates through the centuries. That metallic sound is distinctly modern, a sound that couldn’t have been created without the mid-century innovations that flourished in the confines of the recording studio. Eddy understood the difference. About a decade ago, he told Guitar Player magazine: ‘It’s not just about playing the instrument, but also about making the record. I think a better way to explain it is that I don’t write or arrange songs as such. Instead, I think of it as writing or fixing records. My sound is the common denominator that binds all the threads together.’

Eddy developed this aesthetic early in his career with Lee Hazlewood, a DJ-turned-record producer who also resided in Phoenix, Arizona. The pair co-wrote ‘Moovin’ ‘N Groovin’, taking the intro from Chuck Berry’s ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’ before adopting a stretchy boogie. In the absence of a resonance chamber, the pair improvised a water storage tank to enhance the bass of Eddy’s gangly guitar. Almost immediately, they fine-tuned their attack with ‘Rebel Rouser’, an arrogant piece where Eddy’s guitar sounds bold and melodious; it was a call to party.

However, mischief did not become a reference for Eddy, much less in the way he defined Link Wray, the other pioneering rock instrumentalist of the 50s. Wray’s powerful chords strutted slowly, conveying a sense of imminent danger, a threat embodied in his signature hit “Rumble,” which entered the Billboard charts a few months before “Rebel Rouser.” Melody wasn’t his thing, while for Eddy it was another primary color. His natural melody, combined with his love of texture, allowed him to play for a much wider audience than teenagers: if your Cinerama production needed a touch of accent, you could turn to Eddy.

Eddy also had the good looks that convinced Hollywood to give him a shot at film, but A Thunder of Drums and The Wild Westerners didn’t make him the next Elvis. He ended up on RCA, the same label as Presley, producing a series of adult LPs in the early 60s that led him to slowly turn to light music. Eddy sounded flexible and competent on these records, especially when Twist and Watusi were all the rage—((Dance with the) Guitar Man’ gave him his last big hit in 1962—but he soon lost sight of his audience. The Biggest Twang Of All, a 1966 LP that was the last time he got tangled up in contemporary pop, finds him playing hits by Mamas and Papas and Frank Sinatra, balancing James Brown’s “Night Train” with “The Ballad of the Green Berets”, auditioning with two versions of Lovin” Spoonful and following up with “A Groovy Kind of Love” with the title track from Broadway’s Mame.

The Biggest Twang Of All is a real disaster, but, like all of his other mid-“60s LPs, it proves that Eddy is adaptable, that he continues to sound like himself as he dances with Sunset strippers, rides the waves in Water Skiing, mimics the Byrds in Duane Does Dylan, and indulges in ostentatious nostalgia in The Roaring Twangies. an album as ridiculously silly as its title. These records aren’t exactly rocking (they’re clearly showbiz creations), but they’re livelier than the boring LPs of the early 60s. Still, the epochal affections of both periods can make it difficult to hear about Eddy’s achievements: they are crying out for some kind of cultural context.

Interestingly, British synth-pop collective Art of Noise helped put Eddy’s influence into perspective in the mid 80s, bringing the guitarist back after a long period in the wild. The guitarist spent almost twenty years in nature – he played occasional sessions and dedicated himself to production, never bothering to sign a record deal. When Art of Noise recruited him to play on their version of “Peter Gunn”, the television detective song that Henry Mancini wrote in 1972. 1959. Eddy took to the charts shortly after with a cover. “Peter Gunn” is a kind of hall of mirrors in itself.

Henry Mancini wrote the vibrant melody partially inspired by rock and roll, employing piano and brass as central instruments, but the melody slips in such a way as to suggest that Eddy was the composer’s inspiration.

Certainly, Eddy’s successful performance makes the song seem like his own, and the more succinct arrangement enhances the inherent freshness of the riff. Art of Noise gave Eddy the central role in their new cut-and-paste version; his danceable beats and electronic clamor at first seem far removed from Eddy’s Western rock and roll, but his studio technique underscores how the guitarist himself used the studio as a second instrument.

“Peter Gunn” gave Eddy an unexpected hit and a Grammy (he took home the trophy for Best Rock Instrumental), which helped his acolytes come out of nowhere for a major comeback album in 1987.

With a couple of his original Rebels in the studio—Larry Knectel and saxophonist Jim Horn—Eddy reunited with Art of Noise for a couple of tracks; he covered the absurd “Tema Rockestra” by Wings with its author, Paul McCartney, on bass and production; he snuck into the Cloud 9 sessions to record some tunes with George Harrison and Jeff Lynne; he delighted in the soundscapes of the West, devised by Ry Cooder; and let James Burton, John Fogerty and Steve Cropper tear him apart in a song called “Kickin” Asphalt”. There is a small gap between the individual aesthetics of each group of musicians, but Eddy sounds comfortable in each context.

The heroic guitars of Burton, Fogerty, and Cropper are flashier than Eddy”s laconic solos, but he established the tradition of taking the stage with a guitar. Cooder”s cinematic scope is perfectly in tune with the old Hazlewood productions. And Eddy’s economical phrasing fits perfectly with Lynn”s precise productions, making clear the debt Harrison owes to the rocker.

“The Trembler,” a song he co-wrote with Ravi Shankar for the ’87 record—naturally, it featured Shankar’s friend George Harrison and Jeff Lynne—showed up on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, Eddy contributed to Hans Zimmer’s score for John Woo’s Broken Arrow, and the guitarist classed up “Until the End of Time,” a modest adult contemporary hit for Foreigner in 1995.

A concert at the Royal Festival Hall in 2010 set the wheels in motion for Road Trip, an album co-produced by Richard Hawley and Colin Elliot that may be the first record Eddy ever made without modern sounds in mind. It’s suspended out of time and its floating spaciousness emphasizes Eddy’s sly versatility: “Twango” finds him nodding to the hot jazz of Django Reinhardt.

Duane Eddy – Twango.

Duane Eddy – The Trembler

Guitar – Duane Eddy; Producer, Keyboards, Synthesizer, Bass – Jeff Lynne; Slide Guitar – George Harrison; Tenor Saxophone – Jim Horn; Drums – Jim Keltner; Engineer – Richard Dodd; Written-By – D. Eddy, R. Shankar

Road Trip is nowhere to be found on streaming services, nor is Rhino’s thirty-year-old comp Twang Thang, which is a shame as both trim away many of Eddy’s excesses and focus squarely on material that wasn’t thoroughly skewed by contemporary pop notions. (The same can’t be said of 1987’s Duane Eddy, which is also not on streaming services.) It’s another reminder that while it may be easier to listen to more music than ever—in Eddy’s particular case, it’s possible to spin the (quite nice) Tokyo Hits LP, which only appeared in Japan in the late ’60s—but it can be harder to properly hear the recordings.

It’s a problem exacerbated by a surplus of reissues and compilations, all seemingly covering the same territory but either delivering too much or too little of one period or keeping his early Jamie hits far away from his RCA sides. Some clever playlisting could perhaps solve some of these problems—I did not have time to assemble one myself—but it currently takes some effort to hear the best of Duane Eddy in the modern digital landscape. 

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