Auburn “Pat” Hare was born December 20, 1930 in Cherry Valley, Arkansas, and by the early 1950s he was a sought-after sideman in Memphis, recording at Sun Studio and backing Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bobby Bland. In 1954, on James Cotton’s Cotton Crop Blues and its B-side Hold Me in Your Arms, he pushed a small Sears and Roebuck amplifier far past its limit to produce a tearing, clipped tone that music historians consider the first recorded use of heavy, distorted power chords. This episode breaks down the physics of that sound, why engineers of the day treated it as a mistake, and how stripping the third out of a chord created the emotionally ambiguous, massive wall of sound that heavy metal would later build on.

The story also covers Hare’s work with Junior Parker’s Little Junior’s Blue Flames, his blazing solo on the 1953 track Love My Baby, and the 1957 crossover hit Next Time You See Me, which reached number five on the R&B chart and number 74 on the pop chart. Then it turns to the darker record: on May 14, 1954 Hare cut his own version of Dr. Clayton’s I’m Gonna Murder My Baby, a menacing track driven by downward-shifting power chords. Severe alcoholism transformed a quiet family man into someone unstable enough to be fired from Muddy Waters’ band in late 1963 and replaced by James “Pee Wee” Madison. That December in Minneapolis, Hare shot and killed his girlfriend and then shot the police officer who responded. He listed his occupation as window washer, pleaded guilty, formed a prison band called Sounds Incarcerated, and died of lung cancer in a St. Paul, Minnesota facility in 1980 at age 49.

• How a cheap catalog amplifier, cranked past its limit, produced the first recorded heavy distortion on Cotton Crop Blues
• The music theory behind the power chord and why removing the third makes a chord sound massive and hollow
• Hare’s sideman years with Muddy Waters and Junior Parker, and how his tone reached British Invasion bedrooms
• The chilling 1954 recording of I’m Gonna Murder My Baby and its structural link to modern hard rock
• The 1963 murders in Minneapolis, the window-washer arrest record, and the difficult question of art versus artist