Duane Eddy That Classic Twang

There have been other Duane Eddy greatest hits packages, but this is the one. Remastered from the original tapes for the first time, this set includes 24 cuts in ear-popping clarity. Rebel Rouser, Moovin' 'n' Groovin', Ramrod, Cannonball, Yep!, 3-30 Blues, Forty Miles Of Bad Road, Some Kinda Earthquake, Shazam (MONO and STEREO), Pepe, Kommotion, Because They're Young, and 12 more!

Let's not talk about guitarists who can play circles around other guitarists, or about which famous picker influenced which other famous picker. Let's talk instead about guitarists who influenced kids, tens of thousands of kids, to pick up the guitar. In that regard, no one succeeded like Duane Eddy. He extended a sense of the possible to kids sitting on the edge of their beds cradling their first guitar. After a week or two, they could pick out a few bars of Rebel Rouser or Forty Miles of Bad Road, and pretend in front of the mirror at least that they were Duane Eddy.

It would take years to approximate the tone and dynamics of the originals - even if it could be done ',at all, but with his commanding . 'simplicity Duane Eddy could plant a seed where other guitarists would just make a young picker shake his head and want to heave the instrument into the yard.

Duane Eddy also earns his place in the history books for being the first to make instrumentals that were true rock 'n' roll records. Even on the smallest record player, these were big records. There's a rock 'n' roll sensibility here; an onrush of hormones and teenage brashness. Later, we found that this was due in no small measure to the production genius of Lee Hazlewood, but it was Duane Eddy's name on the record -and a very rock 'n' roll name it was. The titles of the songs were very rock 'n' roll titles, too. Rebel Rouser, Stalkin' And then how many kids wanted to buy a red Gretsch guitar with a Bigsby tremolo tailpiece like Duane Eddy? He was probably the best salesman either company ever had.

Although he's associated with Phoenix, Arizona, Duane was born in Corning in far upstate New York, 150 miles from the Canadian border. He grew up there and in other small upstate New York towns like Bath and Penn Yan. There was a surprisingly good market for country music in the north country, and several of the southern Saturday night radio jamborees, like the Opry and the WWVA Wheeling, West Virginia Jamboree, could be picked up there loud and clear. Duane's father showed him a few chords on a guitar laying around the house, and Duane had got his first guitar, a Kay, and a lap steel guitar by the time he was nine. He was on local radio in upstate New York before the Eddys moved to Arizona in 1951 when Duane was 13. His father set himself up in a grocery business there.

Duane formed a band that played around Coolidge, Arizona, southeast of Phoenix. According to some accounts, they were heard by Lee Hazlewood, then a dee-jay in Coolidge; according to other accounts, Duane was hanging around the station where Hazlewood worked, even babysat for Hazlewood before they ever struck up a professional relationship. Regardless, the affiliation with Hazlewood was the critical one in Duane Eddy's career. Hazlewood got Duane and his group a fairly steady date at the Madison Square Garden in Phoenix, and another gig playing the hillbilly hits of the hour on the local ABC-TV affiliate.
Before then, around 1955, Duane met Al Casey, the premier hillbilly guitarist in and around Phoenix. Duane asked if he could sit in on a club date, and, even though Casey said later that he didn't see much in Duane, he let him hang around and showed him some of what he knew. Duane also says that he took a couple of lessons from western swing guitarist Jimmy Wybele...