Duane Eddy: A Few Bumps, But 40 Miles Of Mostly Good Road
Before Duane Allman, there was Duane Eddy.
And while the history of rock ’n’ roll guitar should not be written without Duane Allman, it cannot be written without Duane Eddy.
Eddy, who died Tuesday of cancer in Tennessee, age 86, scored 15 top-40 hits between 1958 and 1963, notably including “Rebel Rouser,” “Because They’re Young” and “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” which remains one of the best rock ’n’ roll song titles ever.
Unlike the “guitar gods” who came along in the following decade, the likes of Allman, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, Eddy wasn’t always stretching it out, seeing how far he could take it.
His records, exemplified by his breakthrough 1958 single “Rebel Rouser,” were pretty basic stuff, proving once again that sometimes well-executed basics is all you need. Duane Eddy tunes were catchy and melodic. Were you so inclined, you could dance to them.
Among the ears they caught were those of aspirational young music fans like Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen. Eddy’s first record, “Moovin’ and Groovin’,” peaked at №72 on the national charts in the early spring of 1958, but its intro chords reached №3 six years later when Brian Wilson re-created them, note for note, as the opening of the Beach Boys’s “Surfin’ USA.”
In his book The Golden Age of Rock Instrumentals, author Steve Otfinoski notes that alongside his producer Lee Hazelwood, Eddy “made the instrumental a viable genre of rock, not just a one-shot novelty, but a genre that artists could grow and mature in.”
Eddy, who had Elvis-level good looks and dropped out of high school at 16 to start a long-shot career as a musician, said in a 1987 interview that he had no clue he might one day be credited with influence on anything like that level.
“I never thought about the future,” he said. “I never thought that far ahead. The focus was just to make a record and succeed with it.”
And so he did. By 1963, he had sold an estimated 12 million records. Then the British invaded and like a lot of artists who populated the charts in the first seven or eight years of rock ’n’ roll, Eddy found himself on the outside looking in.
A quarter century later, he was philosophical about that.
“When the Beatles arrived, I figured it was time to take it a little easier,” he said in 1987. “Things cooled down. But I had a good five-year run and that’s about how long an artist stays hot anyway. Music is like food. You find something you like, you have it for a while, then you move on to something else.”
He tried several comebacks over the years, grafting his “twang” guitar style onto a range of songs from “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero.” His self-titled 1987 album featured McCartney, Harrison, Fogerty, Ry Cooder and other admirers. None really caught on in the States, though he retained a large and loyal fan base in Europe.
He said, matter of factly, that the changes in the music business made it challenging for artists like him to get the exposure that could rekindle popularity.
“The trend in the early days of rock ’n’ roll is that there was no trend,” he said. “You could be pop, country, anything, and if it was a good record, you could get promotion and exposure. That doesn’t happen now. Everything is locked into compartments. Even if a record is a hit, half the radio stations won’t play it because it doesn’t fit their format.”
He said he found it pleasing, not ironic, how many of the artists who supplanted him were fans. “I’m always surprised when anyone even knows who I am,” he said. “I felt that way with Elvis, and it knocks me out when I hear it from someone like George Harrison or Paul McCartney. I’m nervous even meeting them. But with George, it was like we were instant friends. He’s one of the finest persons I ever met.”
His best-person list also included, by the way, Elvis. “We talked for an evening after a show in 1971,” Eddy said. “Mostly about his studying religion and philosophy. We had a great time. In private, he was very normal.”
Eddy lived in the center of early rock ’n’ roll history himself, though he came to it by way of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and country music. His first band was a country duo with his friend Jimmy Delbridge.
“My musical hero was Hank Williams,” he said. “I also liked Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, George Jones, but I personally think Hank started rock ’n’ roll. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley thought so, too. If you listen to ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ it’s the same as Hank’s ‘Move It On Over.’
“My partner and I wanted to be like the Louvin Brothers or the Wilburn Brothers. I did some singing then, but it made it nervous to sing and play at the same time. So I decided for me it had to be one or the other. I made the right choice.”
He had gone solo when he met Hazelwood, who liked Eddy’s guitar playing, but thought it needed more things going on. He hired the Sharps, a black vocal group who backed Thurston Harris on “Little Bitty Pretty One” and would later have their own hit as the Rivingtons with “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.” On Eddy’s records, that’s the Sharps doing the hand-clapping, harmonies, vocal interjections and general background business.
Eddy was fine with that. He was fine with setting up a microphone to send the sound through a water tank. Even when “Because They’re Young” became so orchestrated that his guitar turned into a supporting player, he said, it was still his music.
“Some of it was just luck,” he said. “I was fortunate to come along at a time when there were other instrumentalists — Link Wray, the Ventures, Johnny and the Hurricanes. When there are more of those records around, they build interest and feed on each other. But there were also things about music that I knew, like that the bass strings recorded stronger than the high strings. There was nothing mysterious about how it developed. I used tremolo, vibrato, whatever the record called for.”
And no, he said, he never got tired of playing “Rebel Rouser” or “Forty Miles of Bad Road.” “They still feel fresh,’ he said. “They feel like old friends.”
He made human friends, too. “I remember meeting Ritchie Valens,” he said. “He and I and Eddie Cochran walked through the streets of New York one night trying to find a Mexican restaurant. And they did.”
A lot of artists he met in the studio, like when Darlene Love or Hal Blaine worked on his records. Some he met on the road, since promotion in the early days of rock ’n’ roll often meant sending a pack of artists out on a long bus tour.
“All you heard then was that this wasn’t going to last,” he said. “Rock ’n’ roll was a fad, like the hula hoop.” So record companies and promoters wanted to cash in fast and cheap.
“You might have 15, 16 artists doing 60 or 70 dates,” Eddy said. “And on the bus, gospel music was one of the common threads. You’d have Chuck Berry singing it. Lavern Baker, Dion. I remember Chubby Checker doing ‘Unchained Melody.’
“Then sometimes we’d just pile into a ’56 Chevy and hitch a U-Haul to the back. We were young. We were doing it for pleasure. It was a wonderful time. We had no idea what we were doing would one day get this respect.”
Though he knows, he said, why it did.
“The music you hear,” he said, “is scoring your life.”
