Post #34: Link Wray
The original hillbilly wolf.
This week’s offering is a bit of a departure. It’s a throwback—featuring a series of pictures with people as the subject(s), and different stylistically from anything else that I’ve shared—to 14 years ago, and my first art show.
In early 2010 I had just moved to Colorado from Maryland, but went back to exhibit my work at the Frederick Council of the Arts—a nonprofit arts organization in beautiful downtown Frederick, MD. It was an exciting thing—this, my first show—and I ended up selling nine or ten paintings. The pictures I showed were divided into two distinct categories: people on bicycles and people not on bicycles—notably rock & roll stars in the non-bicycle group, but also others, including Santa Claus. All of the pictures that I sold were from the bicycle group.
My favorite painting from that show is one that I did of Link Wray. I came across the rolled up unstretched canvas the other day, and ruminated on the painting, and that distinct time/event. Like so many firsts, that first show holds a special place in my thoughts and memory.
Link Wray was too cool for school. How cool? SO Cool. Early in his career he sang as well as played guitar, but after losing a lung after contracting tuberculosis while serving in the Army in Korea, he concentrated on the guitar. He became one of Rock & Roll’s early and most influential guitar pioneers, writing some of the greatest rock instrumentals of all time, like ‘Rumble’, ‘Ace of Spades’, and ‘Jack the Ripper’. In the 1970’s he had a famous collaboration with the rockabilly singer/revivalist Robert Gordon, producing the classic album “Fresh Fish Special”. My favorite song off that album is their cover of the Warren Smith classic, ‘Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache’. Click on the song title to link to it—it’s amazing. By the way, Robert Gordon looked the shit, as well, with an amazing head of hair.
Later in his career, Link Wray, clad in a leather jacket and sunglasses, and sporting amazing hair, cut the quintessential image of the hillbilly wolf. That look and feel is what I aimed to capture in my painting.
Some day I will unfurl my Link Wray canvas, re-stretch him onto a frame, and display him in a place of prominence. He deserves that.
These are fantastic. I’d love to see them sometime.