This Link Wray appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand from 1959 is great for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s kind of fun observing a bunch of palm-to-mouth teenyboppers as they try to decide what to do with themselves while watching a guy with some of the gnarliest guitar tone of all time rip it up in front of them. Wray is famous for supposedly “inventing” the power chord and for punching holes in his speakers to get the raunchiest recording sound possible. Yes, Wray had scored a hit in April of 1958 with his now ultra-famous and influential tremolo soaked instrumental swamp ballad, “Rumble” released just under a year before this American Bandstand appearance, but it was banned from the airwaves in some markets for being just too damned raw and for using the slang term (obvious now) for a gang fight. I’ve got to imagine, judging by the “I’m supposed to be liking this, right?” looks on the faces of the young audience, that they were a at least a little befuddled by the performance. At the time of this appearance in early 1959, Wray had just released the single for “Rawhide” (not the version you might be thinking of) that he and the band play on the show. Wray’s “Rawhide” is also just a cool instrumental in its own right.
Link Wray looking like a bad man with his 1958 Danelectro Longhorn “Guitarlin”
More importantly however (for me anyways) is that the clip also provides a chance to take a look at the source of Wray’s tone (half anyways, I’m not sure what kind of amp he was using), the ultra-bizzaro 1958 Danelectro Longhorn “Guitarlin” that Wray plays in the clip and with which he performed and recorded during the last few years of the fifties. Boasting a very long neck with an unprecedented 31 frets and a deep double cutaway that produces the “long horns” jutting out from the guitar’s oddly shaped body, the Guitarlin is something to behold in any decade, but this was pretty far out for 1959. It was so weird, in fact, that only about 200 were ever made between 1958 and 1968 according to one source. It was called a “Guitarlin” because the long neck allowed for narrow fret spacing close to the guitar body that could supposedly get the player into the mandolin tonal range.
Guitar Oddity: The weird looking Danelectro Longhorn “Guitarlin”
Lipstick pickups and small fret spacing of the long necked “Guitarlin”
The two lipstick pickups that you see in picture above are just as responsible for Link Wray’s storied late fifties tone than the shape of the guitar, though. Why lipstick pickups? Because the electronics for them were literally housed inside metal canisters originally designed to hold lipstick. The pickups became standard issue on a variety of Danelectro guitars and on Silvertones, which Danelectro also manufactured and distributed for a time for Sears Department stores as cheap axes marketed towards beginners. The pickups produce a jangly, trebly tone that has become famous among collectors and retro sound enthusiasts and so many people use Silvertones today for recording and performing that it’s not even worth making a list.
According to some guys who know a whole lot more than I do about this kind of thing, finding one of these original “Guitarlins” would set you back a couple of grand, mainly because Link Wray used one.
For those of you who care about such things, Link Wray was nominated for but not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.
You can read more about Link Wray, the Guitarlin and all kinds of other guitar trivia in Deke Dickerson’s Strat in the Attic: Thrilling Stories of Guitar Archaeology.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Be Wild, Not Evil: ‘Mr. Guitar’ Link Wray tears it up at Winterland in 1974