Davie Allan - Musical Legacy

Musical Legacy

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.

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 displayed on tracks like “Devil's Rumble,” “Cycle-Delic” and “King Fuzz” presaged 1980s acts like Sonic Youth.

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 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.