DUANE EDDY – Melody Maker, October 10, 1973

Duane Eddy, who had died aged 86, was the first great solo guitar hero of the rock’n’roll era. Arriving a couple of years before Hank Marvin in The Shadows and Bob Bogle in The Ventures, Duane was the first instrumentalist to motivate young rock’n’roll guitarists in the UK, among them 14-year-old John Entwistle who always cited Duane’s twangy style as his first inspiration. 

        “Clocking the American guitarist Duane Eddy’s propulsive ‘Ramod’ single on Radio Luxembourg, Entwistle became an instant convert,” writes Paul Rees in The Ox, his authorised Entwistle biog. “By rote, he learned the sax parts to Eddy’s 1958 album Have Guitar Will Travel.” Later, Rees explains how John sought to emulate Duane Eddy’s trademark ‘twangy’ sound in the bass solo on The Who’s ‘My Generation’. 

        Duane’s records, alongside those by Elvis, Buddy and the Everly Brothers, were among the first I ever owned, and my favourite was ‘Because They’re Young’, a more melodic slice of twang that I always thought Joe Meek had in mind when he wrote ‘Telstar’ for The Tornados. 

        I got to meet Duane when I interviewed him in Los Angeles in September, 1973. He was one of those strong silent types, as I recall, a no-nonsense guy, a man who thought carefully before he spoke, a gentle giant. A loquacious interviewee, he reminded me a bit of the character James Coburn plays in The Magnificent Seven. 

There was no specific reason for interviewing Duane Eddy. He wasn’t about to release a new record or play a concert. I somehow knew he lived and worked in LA – as a music publisher as it happened – and thought he’d be an interesting subject. In the same week I interviewed Iggy Pop, quite the opposite in every way, and the two interviews appeared side by side in Melody Maker – “Los Angeles Report by Chris Charlesworth”! – issue dated October 10, 1973. Here, word for word, is my piece about Duane. 

The first real guitar superstar of the rock and roll age sits in an office no larger than a bathroom on North Vine off the Hollywood Boulevard. It’s a music publishing office and he’s there to listen to songs, to cast his experienced eye over good and bad, and reject or accept according to their worth.

There’s a stand-up piano behind his crammed desk, a tape player to his right and, apart from some papers, little else. There are no gold records on the wall, none of the plush furnishings you come to expect in music business offices and no indication that the man behind the desk was voted top guitarist in the world year after year during the late fifties and early fifties. His name isn’t even on the door.

His name is Duane Eddy, and his rumbling, twangy guitar blasted out of every juke box in the land 12 years ago. Just what contribution he made to worldwide sales of the instrument is incalculable; how many budding guitarists he influenced is anyone’s guess. 

His hits, in case you don’t remember, included ‘Rebel Rouser’, ‘Shazam’, ‘Forty Miles Of Bad Road’ and ‘Because They’re Young’. They were all on the London/American label, the outlet that spawned so many of his contemporaries and accounted for a high percentage of my record collection in pre-Beatle days. 

Duane was casualty of the Liverpool boom. After The Beatles, his records stopped selling and now he’s more involved with publishing and production, although he plays concerts occasionally and plans a working trip to Britain in the near future. He has fond memories of the UK and hopes to be playing in Britain before the end of the year.

Stretched out on the swivel chair behind his desk, he talks slowly and knowledgeably with the air of a man who’s seen everything, summed it all up and formed unshakeable opinions. He’s a big guy whose firm wrist greets my handshake and a smile escapes his lips only when something is genuinely funny. The greased quiff from the fifties has been replaced by a shortish Beatle-cut and he’s wearing a short but tidy beard.

His last project, about which he’s most excited, is the production of an album by Phil Everly, who’s a close friend from way back. He’s made no recent records of his own, though he did play on the Phil Everly sessions, and it’s more than two years since he stopped performing regularly. 

“The records stopped selling and that had a lot to do with my decision to stop recording,” he drawls with a wry smile. “There was nothing exciting happening for me. There was a lot of acid rock and that’s not my type of thing. What I was doing wasn’t of any interest to anybody but me and the few people involved. Now things are changing around and acid rock doesn’t seem as popular as it was. People want the old records and they might just want some new records by the old people, as they’re getting tired of hearing the same stuff again and again. I’d prefer to do some new stuff in the same style but more updated.”

Duane notched up eight gold records and a few British silver ones during his heyday. It all started in a studio in Phoenix, Arizona, when Lee Hazlewood, the producer and a long time friend, decided to make some instrumental records. Hazlewood knew Duane played guitar and brought him in to make a record called ‘Moving And Grooving’ which was released by a small Philadelphia label called Jamie Records. It made the fifties in the charts and encouraged Duane to go back into the studio and make ‘Rebel Rouser’.

“We did the Dick Clark Show playing ‘Moving And Grooving’ and ‘Rebel Rouser’ but we had to find a number to finish with. One of the guys in the group, Al Casey, had written a song called ‘Ramrod’ and we did that. The show was on Saturday night. One the Monday morning we had 100,000 orders for the record. We went back in and produced it very quickly.

“That was a hit and they all followed on after that. Then there was ‘Cannonball’, ‘Detour’, ‘The Lonely Ones’, ‘Some Kind Of Earthquake’, ‘Shazam’, ‘Forty Miles Of Bad Road’, ‘Because They’re Young’, ‘Guitar Man’, ‘Peter Gunn’. It’s quite a list and I can’t think of them all.

“I toured from the time ‘Rebel Rouser’ came out – 1958 – until the time The Beatles got very big in 1964.  It was frantic all the time, just like Beatlemania expect that it was rock-mania. The crowds in the US were very vocal, screaming and everything, and it was a real surprise when I played in London for the first time. I got up and did my show and half way through there was dead silence. They were actually listening and there was polite applause after every song. We thought we were doing very poorly until the end of the show when we discovered how wrong we were. They were stamping and yelling for ten minutes and pulling the place apart.”

In 1964, he says, England had her revenge on America. “When I was touring England about 80 per cent of the charts were American records. In 1964, when I did another tour, the charts were reversed. I was pleased for them. It was only fair. The American had had their own way for too long.”

So, Duane came off the road and rested after six years of hard work. He made the odd album and played the odd concert anywhere in the world, wherever and whenever he felt like it. He tried acting in a couple of Westerns, did a few TV shows and took things easy. Hard rock, with its accompanying drug scene, was the final blow. 

With a kind of father-like concern, Duane has much respect for today’s guitarists. He still considers he was the best guitarist in his day – in his particular field.

“I believe I won one of those polls not too long ago, just a few years ago, when I shouldn’t have,” he says, grinning. “There was a lot of good guitarists around in those days, but I had the hit records and my name was the best known. I certainly think I was the best guitarist at the time, but it depends on how you judge it. What I did on guitar nobody else could do as well, but it becomes a very subjective thing. I can’t play one lick of classical music. Segovia is the man I would consider the best in that field, but there are several others that other people might choose.

“Chet Atkins* is probably the best all-round guitarist in the world. When you get into the jazz field there’s Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery and countless others, and there’s no way to measure who’s better than another. When you get among the best in any field, they can all do the job,

“I had a lot of imitators, who could probably do some things better than I could, but instead of doing those things they tried to copy me. They were coming in on my terms and they got nowhere. I remember The Shadows, who were an excellent group, and they didn’t try to imitate me, and The Ventures who were also an excellent group. They’re still going, selling thousands of albums.”

Duane has much respect for Eric Clapton. “The guitar solo he did on George Harrison’s ‘Something’ was one of the finest guitar solos I have heard anywhere. [He was wrong there. George played it but I didn’t wish to correct him – CC.] But Cream did not impress me at all. They were just a jazz trio with the volume turned up full blast so you had to stand 20 feet away to even begin to hear what they were playing. I know a lot of guys who just jam and I felt that’s what they were doing basically. 

“I guess Clapton has gone the same way I did, tired of doing the same things over and over again. Once you have established a great sound and great style, you find it difficult to know what to do next. He probably just enjoys playing for himself now.

“I miss doing the shows and that’s why I’m hoping this visit to England is going to come off. There’s the nostalgia thing going now, and the kids don’t even remember the records I made. I believe I could make it for a second time if I put my mind to it. I don’t want to sound conceited but if I really concentrated on it I could do it again. I’m torn between record producing and concerts, and while I still like to play a concert once in a while I need to find something more challenging.”

Today Duane still plays his guitar “two or three times a week” for his own amusement. He’s been playing nylon stringed guitar to develop his technique, but he still cherishes the old Guild that the firm made for him and which he was pictured playing countless times. “I have between 18 and 20 guitars at home, all different types. I don’t say I play them every day but I’ll play with some young singer/songwriter to help him along. I’ve never been a singer myself. I tried but it didn’t work too well.”

Duane has lived in Los Angeles for the past eight years, although he was born 35 years ago in Arizona, where it all started for him. He has stayed away from the rock and roll revival shows that are being promoted in the States this year, partly because he wants to do something new, and partly because he feels the old rock and rollers are being exploited by promoters.

“I don’t think there’s any harm in the rock and roll revival shows but there are people making a lot of money out of it right now, just the same as before. They are hiring these groups for two bob a night, as you’d say in England, getting them out there to do their old hits and packing in 20,000 people to see them. They make 60 or 80 thousand from a concert which has cost them five to ten thousand to put on. The ones I’ve done I’ve been well paid for. I didn’t really do it for the money but for the fun of the whole thing.

“I’ve been waiting for something new to be started by the old people but it hasn’t happened yet. I think rock and roll is a type of music, like country or blues or jazz, that will assume a place for itself for ever more. One day they will have a rock and roll chart like they have country or soul charts, or easy listening charts. I think this will happen over the next year or two. When rock and roll started they said it wouldn’t last, but it’s 1973 now.”

* I interviewed Chet Atkins while I was in LA too, again for no specific reason besides wanting to talk to him and thinking MM’s readers might be interested in reading about him. That interview appeared in the November 24, 1973 edition.