Link Wray

Beans and Fatback - 1973

My personal favorite among the handful of “back to roots” albums Link Wray was knocking out around the early 70s, Beans and Fatback doesn’t have the same intimate charm as 1971’s Link Wray, but it more than makes up for it with a nice helping of fuzzed up, down home rave ups. Although the songs on this one were recorded during the same sessions that produced the self-titled LP, Beans and Fatback was Wray’s way of letting the world know that the man who gave us “Rumble” hadn’t gone soft. This album is all over the place. Kicking off with the bluegrassy title track, everything hits high gear by the 6-minute attack of "I'm So Glad, I'm So Proud". That's followed a few songs down the line by an uptempo rework of Leadbelly's "In the Pines", and yet another rehashing of the very same song near the end of the album! You'd have to be a real sad sack not to find something to like about this one. What a ride!

P.S. Original pressings of this LP came with a delicious slice of dried fatback bacon. Awesome.

Link Wray

Mordicai Jones - 1971

Since so many visitors enjoyed Link Wray's self-titled 1971 LP, I thought I'd satisfy a request for more of the same. The Mordicai Jones album is an odd one in the Link Wray canon. Recorded during the same sessions that produced Link Wray, Mordicai Jones was was in essence, a Link Wray album though pianist Bobby Howard, aka Mordicai Jones, took top billing. Although Howard's voice was more polished than Links, this record still sounds like music made by folks who actually worked the farm they lived on, and the rough and flinty energy of these sessions wears a lot better than what most of their contemporaries were doing. Now able to concentrate solely on instrumental duties, Link plays some fine slide guitar on this album.

Link Wray

Link Wray - 1971

I don't know as much about Link Wray as I should, but I truly love this album. After a hiatus throughout much of the sixties, the man credited with "inventing" the power chord dropped one of the most bizarre comeback albums in music history on an unsuspecting public. Recording many of the instruments himself on a 3-track recorder in his chicken coop-turned-studio, Wray and his brother Vernon created this country-rock masterpiece that rests somewhere between The Band and Captain Beefheart on an island of its own. While at the same time there existed bands who aimed to evoke a rock'n'roll vision of Americana, of white clapboard chapels, dungareed farmers, dusty drifters and outlaws, the Wrays were making the real thing, and doing it better than all of em'. Instead of a drum kit, Wray just had to "stomp real hard" on the floor. "It was no problem--all we wanted was time".

Link Wray - Link Wray