You could get the measure of Duane Eddy – who has died aged 86 – from a selection of his album titles: Have “Twangy” Guitar Will Travel (1958, his debut), The “Twangs” the “Thang” (1959), $1,000,000.00 Worth of Twang (1960, with Volume 2 in 1962), Twistin’ ’n’ Twangin (1962), “Twangin’” Up a Storm (1963), The Biggest Twang of All (1966). Concentrate not on the eccentric use of quotation marks, but on the twang, because that’s what Eddy did. From 1958 to 1963 his guitar sound – a decade later, Melody Maker would call him “the first real guitar superstar of the rock and roll age” – was all over the charts in both the US and UK, inspiring countless hordes, before disappearing almost completely when the Beatles transformed pop music.
Eddy’s sound was based on playing his lead lines on the bass strings of his guitar, then recording them in such a way that the echo and reverb was exaggerated. If he sounded as if he was playing inside a giant water tank, that was no accident: he was. When he started recording at Audio Recorders in Phoenix, Arizona, with Lee Hazlewood as producer and co-writer in 1957, Hazlewood put him inside a giant water tank to use as an echo chamber.
