← Back to Genres

Americana

Tucson, Howe Gelb and friends

Giant Sand

Howe Gelb moved to Tucson in 1972, after a flood destroyed his family's house in Pennsylvania. He started Giant Sandworms with guitarist Rainer Ptacek, who stayed in Tucson with his family when the band went to New York and became Giant Sand. Paula Jean Brown, briefly of the Go-Go's, played bass and was married to Gelb at the time. When Ptacek fell ill in the 1990s, Gelb and Robert Plant put together a benefit album with Emmylou Harris, PJ Harvey, Vic Chesnutt and others. After 2004 Gelb rebuilt the band with Danish musicians, and his 2012 country rock opera mixed players from Tucson and Denmark. A 1996 documentary, Drunken Bees, followed the band, and they scored the film Ingenious. Between 1985 and 2015 they released around thirty records.

Lucky Wray to Copenhagen

Link Wray

Link Wray's early band with his brothers played as Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands before it became Link Wray and the Ray Men. In 1964 he released Link Wray Sings and Plays Guitar, and in the late 1970s he made two albums with rockabilly singer Robert Gordon, then Bullshot and a live album recorded at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. He moved to Denmark, married Olive Julie Povlsen, who became his manager, and lived quietly on a small island. He played with Bruce Springsteen in Copenhagen in 1988 and worked with the Danish punk band Sort Sol. Ace and Norton reissued his old records in the 1990s, and Quentin Tarantino used his music in Pulp Fiction. He was still touring in 2005, the year he died.

The Collection