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Duane Eddy

DUANE EDDY OBITUARY

The ominous, cavernous sound that Duane Eddy coaxed from his whang-bar-outfitted Gretsch 6120 hollowbody went a long way towards making the electric guitar the coolest instrument on the planet during rock and roll’s early years. His long string of smash instrumentals opened the floodgates for countless wordless workouts and presaged the surf music craze that Dick Dale, The Ventures, and so many more fleet-fingered fretsmen rode to glory during the early ‘60s. Eddy looked as cool as he sounded—a brooding loner who let his axe do the talking. Speak it did, burning the term ‘twang’ into the teenage lexicon.

Eddy would never have achieved his lengthy stint in the spotlight if not for the savvy production skills of Lee Hazlewood, who gave Duane’s low-end fretwork structure and context with strategically placed sax solos and vocal group yelps. When their mutually beneficial artistic partnership broke up, Eddy’s chart fortunes sank dramatically, even as many other guitarists deeply influenced by his recordings thrived.

Born April 26, 1938 in Corning, New York, Eddy learned his first guitar chords when he was five and took up the lap steel at nine. In 1951, his family relocated to Arizona, settling first in Tucson and then in Coolidge, approximately 60 miles north of Phoenix. Country music was a lot more popular there, and Duane eventually got more serious about his guitar. Hazlewood was toiling as a deejay in Coolidge when Eddy first met him in 1954. Eddy formed a singing duo with pianist Jimmy Dellbridge; billed as Jimmy & Duane, the pair made a ‘55 single for Hazlewood pairing two of Lee’s songs, Soda Fountain Girl and I Want Some Lovin’ Baby, for Hazlewood’s Eb X. Preston label (named after his crotchety on-air alter ego).

Everyone relocated to Phoenix, which became Eddy’s recording base of operations by the time Hazlewood and his production partner Lester Sill helmed Duane’s first solo instrumental single, Moovin’ N’ Groovin’, at Floyd Ramsey’s studio in late 1957. Lee took the track back to L.A. to overdub Plas Johnson’s sax in early ’58, Sill selling the master and its flip Up And Down to Jamie Records in Philadelphia (Duane’s ‘twangy guitar’ received sub-billing on the label). Dick Clark, the host of ABC-TV’s daily ‘American Bandstand,’ owned 25 percent of Jamie, so exposure was assured. Clark got further involved with Eddy’s career by taking on his management until the payola hearings forced his divestiture as both manager and label owner.

Moovin’ N’ Groovin’ dented the low and of the pop charts, but it was Eddy’s Jamie encore Rebel-‘Rouser that made him a star during the summer of 1958. Playing its melody entirely on the low strings of his guitar and modulating with practically every chorus, Eddy and producer/co-writer Hazlewood struck gold. Ace sessioneer Al Casey, the pianist on many of Eddy’s hits but best-known for his guitar work on other Hazlewood productions, was a prime influence on Eddy’s emerging approach.

“We all came up together,” said the late Casey. “If you listen to some of the early stuff, I was experimenting with the low strings and the tremolo before the Duane Eddy stuff, but then he took it and kind of made it his own.” Casey deftly supplied whatever instrument was required on Duane’s sides. “I needed the work,” he said. “We were doing sessions in town. I was just kind of always the utility guy, whatever they needed.”

Rebel-‘Rouser also underwent after-the-fact augmentation in L.A., this time from saxist Gil Bernal and ‘rebel yells’ from an R&B vocal group, The Sharps. It blasted up to #6 pop, and Eddy was an overnight star. It transpired so quickly that one of Casey’s own archived instrumentals had to be exhumed when Duane suddenly found himself in need of a song while appearing live on the “Dick Clark Beech-Nut Show.’ Casey was in Eddy’s touring band, The Rebels, at the time.

“We were just recording one night, and did some instrumentals. Then a year later or something,” said Casey, “Dick Clark had that little Saturday night live show. We were in Miami and ran out of tunes to play. The show ran short, and we only had about five tunes we could play. And Dick Clark said, >Hey, we=re running a little short. Can you guys play something else?= So we played >Ramrod,= which we were playing just to fill out the program. And the next Monday morning, they had an order for like 100,000 records, and there wasn=t any record. So Lee went back in and took my old record, chopped it up a little bit and added sax, added guys yelling and everything, and that=s it.”

Released under Eddy’s name, the slightly doctored Ramrod cracked the Top 30. It was soon followed by an avalanche of instrumental hits for Duane: Cannonball, The Lonely One, the churning grinder “Yep!,” and Forty Miles Of Bad Road, a Top Ten seller during the summer of ’59. “I wrote the first part, and Duane put the bridge in,” noted Casey. “That song=s been very, very good to me.” “Yep!” was done in New York while Eddy was on tour, but the rest were cut in Phoenix, its low overhead allowing the guitarist and his crew unlimited studio time to experiment.

“Although we did run everything through the union, there wasn=t any big, strong union enforcement like strict three-hour dates or anything,” said Casey. Ramsey’s facilities boasted a world-class echo chamber: a $200 grain storage tank attached to the side of the building that made Eddy’s guitar licks sound truly massive. “That was funny--we used to have to stop recording if it rained. It was sitting outside. Or if the cops would go by with a siren or something. Or sometimes birds would land on it and start singing,” remembered Casey. “It really worked.”

The Los Angeles-cut Because They’re Young, attached to a movie of the same name starring none other than Dick Clark (Eddy mimed Shazam!, one of his lesser charters, in a dance scene), was Duane’s top seller of all for Jamie in 1960, adding a sumptuous string section to his sound and sailing to #4. It was even bigger in England. But Eddy and Hazlewood had a falling out later that year. Although Duane made some nice subsequent recordings on his own for Jamie, there were no more blockbusters to be had.

The twangmaster moved over to RCA Victor in 1962 and temporarily reconciled with Hazlewood, leading to (Dance With The) Guitar Man, which benefitted from the soulful vocal presence of The Blossoms (masquerading as The Rebelettes) as it just missed Top Ten status late that year. Eddy stuck with RCA into 1965, trying valiantly to get in on the surf music craze without much success. He moved on to Colpix and then Reprise with even less commercial response.

But the impact of Duane Eddy was never really muted for long. Nearly three decades after he first charted, Eddy guested on Art of Noise’s 1986 revival of Peter Gunn—the same Henry Mancini-penned TV show theme he’d hit with himself back in 1960—and returned to the mainstream radar once more. Eddy kept a fairly low profile after that, though he did surface every so often for special concert appearances. With his passing on April 30, 2024 at age 86, the King of Twang has left us. His massive influence on guitarists worldwide never will.