Davie Allen and the Arrows - Missing Link
Davie Allan is a guitarist best known for his work on soundtracks to various teen and biker movies in the 1960s. Allan's backing band is almost always the Arrows. Allan grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, and learned to play guitar as a teenager. His career as a musician began when he teamed up with Mike Curb, a friend he met in the choir at Grant High School in Van Nuys, California, to form an instrumental surf combo. Early Davie Allan & the Arrows tracks were stereotypical instrumental surf numbers, with clear-as-a-bell guitar sounds and light, crisp drum work.
Blues Theme
Link Wray invented the vocabulary of modern electric guitarists, but Davie Allan was a minor pioneer in his own right. He is often overlooked, chronologically caught between Wray's more innovative work of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Jimi Hendrix's unrivaled technical brilliance of the late 1960s.
Commanche
Allan's most notable contribution is the creation of the fuzz sound. While Link Wray was the pioneer of guitar distortion, Allan pushed it to a new level, distorting his signal so much as to give his guitar tone a buzzing, grinding quality: "fuzzy". Guitar sounds along similar lines would become a staple of 1970s rock and Allan's penchant for extreme, heavy, noisy guitar work.
Allan is also notable for being what has been called the missing link between surf music and the likes of garage rock, 1960s punk and whacked-out[editorializing] psychedelia. By fusing the simple, clean, guitar-focused musicianship of surf with these heavier, tougher, more vocal-centric styles, Allan, in his own manner, helped pave the way for the "guitar hero" idiom of rock music that dominated the 1970s and 1980s.
Mising Link
Davie Allan is a guitarist best known for his work on soundtracks to various teen and biker movies in the 1960s. Allan's backing band is almost always the Arrows. Allan grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, and learned to play guitar as a teenager. His career as a musician began when he teamed up with Mike Curb, a friend he met in the choir at Grant High School in Van Nuys, California, to form an instrumental surf combo. Early Davie Allan & the Arrows tracks were stereotypical instrumental surf numbers, with clear-as-a-bell guitar sounds and light, crisp drum work.
Blues Theme
Link Wray invented the vocabulary of modern electric guitarists, but Davie Allan was a minor pioneer in his own right. He is often overlooked, chronologically caught between Wray's more innovative work of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Jimi Hendrix's unrivaled technical brilliance of the late 1960s.
Commanche
Allan's most notable contribution is the creation of the fuzz sound. While Link Wray was the pioneer of guitar distortion, Allan pushed it to a new level, distorting his signal so much as to give his guitar tone a buzzing, grinding quality: "fuzzy". Guitar sounds along similar lines would become a staple of 1970s rock and Allan's penchant for extreme, heavy, noisy guitar work.
Allan is also notable for being what has been called the missing link between surf music and the likes of garage rock, 1960s punk and whacked-out[editorializing] psychedelia. By fusing the simple, clean, guitar-focused musicianship of surf with these heavier, tougher, more vocal-centric styles, Allan, in his own manner, helped pave the way for the "guitar hero" idiom of rock music that dominated the 1970s and 1980s.
Mising Link
