Looking at today’s musical birthdays, I don’t feel much like looking for the one or two Bob Seger songs that didn’t get played to death or turned into car commercials. So let’s go back to this weekend’s birthdays, which included Link Wray, born on May 2, 1929. Here he is in a great performance at Winterland in 1974 of his immortal classic “Rumble,” which may have invented modern rock and roll guitar. He had to know he’d done something special when this instrumental started getting banned on radio.
Ed Kilgore, a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, is a columnist for New York. More by Ed Kilgore
