Duane Eddy obit

Remembering 'Rebel Rouser' rock icon Duane Eddy, dead at 86

 

He was not on the list.

Duane Eddy was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 on the strength of a career he launched in 1958 with the million-selling instrumental “Rebel Rouser.”

The most commercially successful instrumental artist in the history of rock 'n' roll, the Grammy-winning guitarist died peacefully on April 30, surrounded by family members in Franklin, Tennessee.

He was 86.

Born in Corning, New York, and raised in New York State, Eddy moved to Tucson then to Coolidge, Arizona, with his family as a teenager. It was while living in Coolidge that he hooked up with a DJ named Lee Hazlewood, who cut the young guitarist’s instrumental breakthrough, “Rebel Rouser,” in a Phoenix studio called Audio Recorders.

“Rebel Rouser” was the third song he and Hazlewood recorded.

The first was “Soda Fountain Girl,” recorded with a friend named Jimmy Delbridge and released in 1955 as a duet by Jimmy and Duane.

In an interview with blogger Simon Nott in 2013, Eddy said of “Soda Fountain Girl,” “The first record Lee Hazlewood produced with Jimmy Dell and myself, we sang together when we were 16/17.

By 1957, Eddy was renting a room from Hazlewood in Phoenix and had purchased his signature hollow-body Gretsch "Chet Atkins" model at Ziggie's Music when a twangy instrumental titled "Raunchy" hit the Top 5 in two versions at the same time — one by Bill Justis, the other by Ernie Freeman.

As Eddy told The Republic in 2020, "When 'Raunchy' hit, Lee said, 'You need to go home and write something. We need to cut an instrumental.'"

Hazlewood had recorded "everybody that could hum a tune by then," Eddy recalled.

"He'd take them in the studio and send the record off to different independent labels in LA to try and get a deal," Eddy said. "I just wanted to play. And he said 'Write an instrumental' so I did."

The next Hazlewood session resulted in “Movin’ ’N’ Groovin’,” a less-than-subtle instrumental rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” It failed to set the charts on fire, stalling at No. 72 in early 1958.

"That was enough to encourage the company back east to say, 'Go do some more,'" Eddy told The Republic. "So we went in, in March of '58, and cut 'Rebel-Rouser.' The rest is history, so to speak."

“Rebel Rouser” was a different matter altogether. Boasting one of early rock and roll’s essential riffs, a haunting low-end melody swimming in echo, it peaked at No. 6 in 1958, and Eddy followed through with two more Top 10 singles, “Forty Miles of Bad Road” (No. 9) and “Because They’re Young” (No. 4) by 1960.

Jon Anderson of Yes told The Republic "Rebel-Rouser" was the first song that inspired him to buy a record.

"They’re incredible recordings," Anderson said. "Very much like Ricky Nelson’s. So damn good. So clean."

Eddy went Top 40 15 times on Billboard’s Hot 100 and sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

'The first rock 'n' roll guitar god'

Released in 1958, his debut album, “Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel,” peaked at No. 5 and spent 82 weeks on the charts. Among his more well-known recordings is the theme to “Peter Gunn,” which peaked at No. 27 on the U.S. charts in 1960 but did better in the U.K., where it peaked at No. 6.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website quotes John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival calling Eddy “the first rock and roll guitar god." The Hall of Fame goes on to note the influence of Eddy’s trademark twang in everything from “Born to Run” to the Beatles (dig the twangy low-end riffing on “I Want to Hold Your Hand”).

Eddy moved to California in the late ’60s, but he talked to the Republic in 2012 about the role the Valley played in shaping the sound of his music.

How the Arizona desert shaped Duane Eddy's twang

“The spaciousness and openness of the desert, the feel of it and the smells, shaped my music," he said. "I play like that, with big notes and open spaces. I figured out through the years that I’ve been subconsciously influenced by that.”

Few guitarists in the history of rock 'n' roll have had a more distinctive trademark than the low-end twang he captured on those instrumental classics he and Hazlewood recorded at Floyd Ramsey's Audio Recorders in Phoenix.

A lot of that came down to Eddy's fondness for the low strings on his hollow-body Gretsch, a preference he developed as a teen at Ramsey's studio when session great Al Casey couldn't make it.

"Sometimes I would do a little turnaround on lead guitar if Al wasn't around," Eddy told The Republic in a 2020 interview.

"And that's when I learned that the low strings were much more powerful than the high ones. So I noted that in my brain and then revisited that idea when I started making my own records."

The other quality that made those early instrumental classics so identifiably Duane Eddy?

That involved a road trip to a junkyard on the banks of the Salt River, where Hazlewood found the echo he was after in an empty water tank they carted back and set up as a makeshift echo chamber in the parking lot behind the studio.

"They just dropped it in there on a rack," Eddy told The Republic. "They put a speaker at one end and a mic at the other and it would come out the speaker, swirl through the tank and the mic would pick it up at the other end and we had our echo. It was great."

Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys is a huge Duane Eddy fan.

"You take this instrument that everybody has," he told The Republic in 2022. "You can go to a store and buy it. But nobody can pick it up and sound like that except Duane Eddy. That is the rarest of abilities as a musician, to take this inanimate object and give it a singular voice. His sound is so identifiable."

Although the hits dried up for Eddy after “Boss Guitar” hit No. 28 in 1963, he played guitar on Art of Noise’s version of the theme to “Peter Gunn,” a Top 10 U.K. hit in 1986. A year later, the legend’s first album in nearly a decade featured guest appearances by Fogerty, George Harrison, James Burton, Ry Cooder and Steve Cropper (of Booker T. & the M.G.’s), speaking to the lasting impact of those early records.

Published in 2004, “The Rolling Stone Album Guide” summed up the pioneering surf guitarist’s role in the early development of rock and roll.

“Twang is the word most closely associated with guitar legend Duane Eddy,” the entry began.

“And certainly that sound best summarizes his personality on record. But Eddy wasn’t all lower-register melodies, liberal tremolo and omnipresent whammy bar. His instrumentals were the original music-minus-one exercises — only the vocalist was missing. This emphasis on song construction separated Eddy from inspired ’50s primitives such as Link Wray and set a standard for the rock instrumental that flowered in the’60s when the Ventures came on the scene, and later with the advent of surf music.”

Eddy always looked back fondly on his days in Phoenix, working with Hazlewood at Audio Recorders.

"That was where it all happened for me," he told The Republic in 2020. "And for Lee."

Eddy is survived by his his wife Deed, four children, five grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.

He had a string of hit records produced by Lee Hazlewood, which were noted for their characteristically "twangy" sound, including "Rebel-'Rouser", "Peter Gunn", and "Because They're Young". He had sold 12 million records by 1963.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2008.

While performing at local radio station KCKY, they met disc jockey Lee Hazlewood, who produced the duo's single, "Soda Fountain Girl", recorded and released in 1955 in Phoenix. Hazlewood then produced Sanford Clark's 1956 hit, "The Fool", featuring guitarist Al Casey, while Eddy and Delbridge performed and appeared on radio stations in Phoenix before joining Buddy Long's Western Melody Boys, playing country music in and around the city.

Eddy devised a technique of playing lead on his guitar's bass strings to produce a low, reverberant "twangy" sound. When he was 19 he had obtained a 1957 Chet Atkins model Gretsch 6120 guitar at Ziggie's Music in Phoenix, Arizona[citation needed] and in November 1957, Eddy recorded an instrumental, "Movin' n' Groovin'", co-written by Eddy and Hazlewood. As the Phoenix studio had no echo chamber, Hazlewood bought a 2,000-gallon (7570-litre) water storage tank that he used as an echo chamber to accentuate the "twangy" guitar sound. In 1958, Eddy signed a recording contract with Lester Sill and Lee Hazlewood to record in Phoenix at the Audio Recorders studio. Sill and Hazlewood leased the tapes of all the singles and albums to the Philadelphia-based Jamie Records.

"Movin' n' Groovin'" reached number 72 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1958; the opening riff, borrowed from Chuck Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man", was in turn copied a few years later by the Beach Boys on "Surfin' U.S.A.". The follow-up, "Rebel-'Rouser", featured a overdubbed saxophone by Los Angeles session musician Gil Bernal, and yells and handclaps by doo-wop group the Rivingtons. The tune became Eddy's breakthrough hit, reaching number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It sold over one million copies, earning Eddy his first gold disc.

Eddy had a succession of hit records over the next few years, and his band members, including Steve Douglas, saxophonist Jim Horn, and keyboard player Larry Knechtel went on to work as part of Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew. According to writer Richie Unterberger, "The singles — 'Peter Gunn', 'Cannonball', 'Shazam', and 'Forty Miles of Bad Road' were probably the best — also did their part to help keep the raunchy spirit of rock and roll alive, during a time in which it was in danger of being watered down." On January 9, 1958, Eddy's debut album, Have 'Twangy' Guitar Will Travel, was released, reaching number five, and remaining on the album charts for 82 weeks. On his fourth album, Songs of Our Heritage (1960), each track featured him playing acoustic guitar or banjo. Eddy's biggest hit came with the theme of the movie Because They're Young in 1960,[3] which featured a string arrangement, and reached a chart peak of number four in America and number two in the UK in September 1960. It became his second million-selling disc. Eddy's records were consistently even more successful in the UK than they were in his native United States, and in 1960, readers of the UK's NME voted him World's Number One Musical Personality, ousting Elvis Presley.

In 1960, Eddy signed a contract directly with Jamie Records, bypassing Sill and Hazlewood. This caused a temporary rift between Eddy and Hazlewood. The result was that for the duration of his contract with Jamie, Eddy produced his own singles and albums.

Duane Eddy and the Rebels became a frequent act on The Dick Clark Show.

During the 1960s, Eddy launched an acting career, appearing in such films as A Thunder of Drums, The Wild Westerners, Kona Coast, and The Savage Seven, and two appearances on the television series Have Gun – Will Travel. He married singer Jessi Colter in 1961, the same year he signed a three-year contract with Paul Anka's production company, Camy, whose recordings were issued by RCA Victor. In the early days of recording in the RCA Victor studios, he renewed contact with Lee Hazlewood, who became involved in a number of his RCA Victor singles and albums. Eddy's 1962 single release, "(Dance With The) Guitar Man", co-written with Hazlewood, earned his third gold disc by selling a million records.

In the 1970s, he produced album projects for Phil Everly and Waylon Jennings. In 1972, he worked with Al Gorgoni, rhythm guitar, on BJ Thomas's "Rock and Roll Lullaby". In 1975, a collaboration with hit songwriter Tony Macaulay and former founding member of The Seekers, Keith Potger, led to another UK top-10 record, "Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar". The single, "You Are My Sunshine", featuring Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, hit the country charts in 1977.

Actor

The Art of Noise Feat. Duane Eddy: Peter Gunn (1986)

The Art of Noise Feat. Duane Eddy: Peter Gunn

8.2

Music Video

Duane Eddy

1986

 

Sing a Country Song

5.8

1973

 

Joan Blondell, Richard Boone, and Vera Miles in Kona Coast (1968)

Kona Coast

4.5

Tiger Cat

1968

 

The Savage Seven (1968)

The Savage Seven

5.4

Eddie

1968

 

Have Gun - Will Travel (1957)

Have Gun - Will Travel

8.4

TV Series

Young Cowboy

Carter Whitney Tyler

1961–1962

2 episodes

 

Nancy Kovack in The Wild Westerners (1962)

The Wild Westerners

5.0

Deputy Marshal Clint Fallon

1962

 

George Hamilton, Richard Boone, and Luana Patten in A Thunder of Drums (1961)

A Thunder of Drums

5.9

Trooper Eddy

1961

 

Music Department

Roger Clark in Red Dead Redemption II (2018)

Red Dead Redemption II

9.7

Video Game

baritone guitar

2018

 

Christian Slater and John Travolta in Broken Arrow (1996)

Broken Arrow

6.1

musician: baritone guitar

1996

 

Dixie Dynamite (1976)

Dixie Dynamite

5.1

musical artist

1976

 

George Hamilton, Richard Boone, and Luana Patten in A Thunder of Drums (1961)

A Thunder of Drums

5.9

musician: banjo, guitar (uncredited)

1961

 

Terry Moore and Debra Paget in Why Must I Die? (1960)

Why Must I Die?

5.6

music

1960

 

Composer

Charlotte Rampling, Willie Nelson, and Sophie Lowe in Waiting for the Miracle to Come (2018)

Waiting for the Miracle to Come

4.2

Composer (music by)

2018

 

La fuga (2014)

La fuga

Short

Composer

2014

 

Because They're Young (1960)

Because They're Young

5.9

Composer (performer: Shazam)

1960