GARAGE ROCK REVIVAL
Garage rock (sometimes called ’60s punk or garage punk) is a raw and energetic style of rock and roll that flourished in the mid-1960s, most notably in the United States and Canada. The style is characterized by the frequent use of basic chord structures played on electric guitars and other instruments, sometimes distorted through a fuzzbox, as well as a tendency towards aggressive and unsophisticated lyrics and delivery. The term “garage rock” derives from the perception that groups were often made up of young amateurs who rehearsed in the family garage, although many were professional. In the 2000s, a wave of Garage Rock Revival acts associated with the post-punk revival emerged, and a handful achieved airplay and commercial success. (More from Wikipedia)
You might think me a little crazy for saying so, but I have been thinking more and more these days that the Garage Rock Revival of the early 2000’s – if I may be so bold as to capitalize the term – is the British Invasion of the 21st Century. Sure, it was not nearly so world-enveloping as the wave of mostly British bands that invaded our shores (after conquering their own continent) nearly a half-century ago, but its effects have been just as far-reaching. One key difference is that the British Invasion happened relatively quickly, once Europeans absorbed the raw R&B and blues records from the good old USA and applied the tactics to their own sensibilities. * * * The British Invasion caught American recording artists flat-footed; they were not used to any overseas competition to speak of. Creedence Clearwater Revival and a revitalized Beach Boys are two of the responses by American recording artists to the British Invasion. But that was hardly the only reaction: American teenagers (mostly white suburban kids) were also invigorated by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all the rest; and they responded by launching a counter-assault, when seemingly every kid in America wanted to be in a band. This era is now known as the garage rock era (that was the most available practice space for most of these would-be rock stars, hence the name); this time period also saw the beginnings of the psychedelic rock movement on both sides of the Atlantic. I didn’t know exactly what I was hearing at the time, but the music by bands like the Seeds, Blues Magoos, the Electric Prunes, Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Standells, Count Five, and Strawberry Alarm Clock (among many other bands) was grabbing me almost immediately. I don’t know that I even realized immediately how bizarre many of these American band names were, as compared to those of British Invasion bands like the Animals, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Dave Clark Five. Thankfully, in 1972 (though if I’m not mistaken, the album was actually not released in the US until 1976), Lenny Kaye – later the guitarist for the seminal Patti Smith Group – helped assemble hit songs by all of these diverse bands plus plenty more into what is now regarded as one of the greatest compilation albums of all times: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. It remains one of my favorite records, and I have spoken of it several times before in these posts. * * * But that turned out to be just the beginning. Though many other Nuggets compilation albums would follow that concentrated on the better-known American bands of the garage rock era, it remained for music historian and legendary record collector Greg Shaw to begin to unearth an astonishing wealth of 45’s released by local American bands on tiny labels that almost no one had heard of before. Beginning in 1978, and under the Pebbles name, Shaw’s AIP label and his alias BFD label put out close to 100 compilation albums. While the Nuggets bands had the backing of major record labels, a lot of the Pebbles songs sounded like they had actually been recorded in a garage. But it wasn’t just garage rock and psychedelic rock either: The Pebbles, Volume 4 LP and the Pebbles, Volume 4 CD showcased rare surf music, illustrating that there was a lot more to the surf scene than the mellow sounds that were hitting the radio in those days by the likes of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean; while the Pebbles, Volume 6 LP – subtitled “The Roots of Mod” – included several rare British beat bands. Greg Shaw later followed up with that album with the now-deleted English Freakbeat Series. Greg Shaw’s Pebbles output also included a vinyl-only series called Highs in the Mid-Sixties – which was nearly as long as the original Pebbles series and focused on particular states and regions – plus a subset of Pebbles called The Continent Lashes Back that put the spotlight on music from continental Europe. The Netherlands in particular has a rich musical scene that rivals the UK. In the decades since, many hundreds if not thousands of additional garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums have been released from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of unknown 45’s, not just from America but from around the world. Though punk rock had already begun to take off, many critics argue that Pebbles, even more than Nuggets helped launch the raw sounds that kept the movement going into the 1980’s and beyond. Besides launching a 4-disk Nuggets Box Set covering the original double-LP and other songs of that period, a second Nuggets box set covering lesser known British and continental European music was also released, called Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969; many of these songs originally appeared on the Pebbles albums. There was also a third box set – Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era - 1976-1995 – highlighting the bands (mostly from the 1980’s) that were inspired by the Nuggets and Pebbles music to develop their own sounds. Perhaps, in response to the Garage Rock Revival, there might be a Grandchildren of Nuggets box set in the future. * * * I was first introduced to the raw 1960’s sounds of Dutch rock when I was fortunate enough to find a copy of a compilation album called Searching in the Wilderness in about 1987 in a fondly remembered basement-level New York record store called Underground Records in the Village. (There was at least one and maybe two other record stores in that same space over the years). Though much of the early output from Dutch bands was heavily influenced by Merseybeat sounds almost to the point of aping them, that was most definitely not true of two of the tracks on that album: “Chunk of Steel”, an early single by Golden Earring; and “For Another Man” by the Motions, which included the future bandleader of Shocking Blue, Robbie van Leeuwen. Wilderness was also my first introduction to other excellent Dutch bands, like the Outsiders (not the American band called the Outsiders that is best known for “Time Won’t Let Me”) and Cuby & the Blizzards. Golden Earring (originally known as the Golden Earrings or the Golden Ear-Rings) formed in 1961 and are still together – yes, you read that right: before the Rolling Stones formed, and before Ringo Starr joined the Beatles. The band had numerous hits in their native Netherlands throughout the 1960’s. The first time I heard Golden Earring was at a party while I was in college (around 1970), where someone was playing their cover of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, a song that simply screamed out to be given a side-long extended jam like the one that this band put together. Golden Earring later had an international hit song in 1973 with “Radar Love”, one of the great road songs that I still hear regularly on the radio. In 1982, they had another big hit with “Twilight Zone”; their fabulous, high-concept video intermingled a spy story that featured a topless model, callous treatment of a dead body, and a brutal injection of some sort of drug by a dancing vixen; along with concert footage and several arty shots. The video for their follow-up hit in 1984, “When the Lady Smiles” was just as controversial; it featured a sexual attack on a nun that showed black lingerie under her habit. I probably have a dozen of their albums, and they are all enjoyable. Another Dutch band, Focus also had a string of albums released in this country and is fairly well known for their 1971 instrumental hit “Hocus Pocus”. * * * I am pretty sure that I must have heard a track or two by the Dutch progressive rock band Ekseption on college radio back in the day; otherwise, I don’t know how Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” would sound so familiar to me. Their virtuoso bandleader Rick van der Linden was a wizard at combining classical music forms with rock, but that statement alone doesn’t do justice to their music: Every album was good, and they were also quite different from one another. The opening track on their self-titled debut album in 1969, Ekseption (which also included “Sabre Dance”) – simply called “The 5th” – is based on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This might be the first pop treatment of the symphony, though there have been many others over the years. One of the Electric Light Orchestra’s earliest hits is a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” that incorporated some parts of the symphony; and then of course, there is the disco version called “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy. Unlike the others though – which mainly focused on the “da da da DUM” opening – Ekseption actually incorporated significant portions of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a more complete work. (I had always heard that the opening was based on Morse Code for the letter “V”, standing for “victory” – not to mention the roman numeral V for Fifth – but evidently, the symphony predated the development of the Morse Code). * * * The three Dutch albums in The Continent Lashes Back sub-series within the Pebbles albums put me onto several more, and I found some other real rarities via the Bomp! mailorder store. I just cleaned up a second 10-inch album among several that I mail-ordered years ago out of an extended series. I even picked up some “Nederpop” records on my trip to Europe (and not just in Amsterdam), including several by Shocking Blue of “Venus” fame, and a band that I have written about several times previously. * * * As punk rock and new wave rock ran its course, alternative rock started up in the 1980’s; and that also kept the popular music world rocking on into the 1990’s, even as other forms of music began intruding into rock’s hegemony, such as hip hop and country. MTV had long since come to terms with rap music and hip hop, but their VJ’s were always chagrined when they kept having to report that the Number One album in the country was by Garth Brooks, probably the most successful crossover artist in popular music history. I was starting to listen to more country music myself by the late 1970’s; I was happily discovering country’s roots such as the Original Carter Family and Hank Williams Sr., and also a lot of the “outlaw country” crowd like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and David Allan Coe. Many of the earliest alt-country artists also caught my ear (before anyone was even using the term), like Randy Travis, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang and Hank Williams III; and some were simply country-flavored rock bands such as the Georgia Satellites and the Kentucky Headhunters. One thing that has really impressed me in country music is the recent emergence, finally, of genuine country bands – instead of just a singer or singers backed by musicians – like Lady Antebellum and the Band Perry. As I remember it, for seemingly ages, the Statler Brothers, and then Alabama kept winning the Grammy for Best Country Duo or Group simply because there really was no one else doing that. As what I think of as alternative rock began to run out of gas in the 1990’s, the next movement was sometimes called modern rock (though I hear few references to that term anymore), which featured bands and artists like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Slayer, Pantera and others. A lot of these bands created a combustible mixture of heavy metal and rap music, and one in particular I really liked, Rage Against the Machine. Besides casting the existing heavy metal scene as a bunch of wimps, they giddily sought to overturn every connection to earlier forms of rock music and, for a time at least, appeared to be poised to sweep aside the rock establishment altogether. The movement seemed to me to rise and fall rather quickly, but frankly, those artists never really spoke to me except on a few stray tracks. What I remember most fondly about the 1990’s is the bumper crop of fine female singer-songwriters and rockers: Joan Osborne, Fiona Apple, Lisa Loeb, Shawn Colvin, Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Paula Cole, and just too many more to name. There was even a series of three music festivals beginning in 1997 that were spearheaded by Sarah McLachlan, called Lilith Fair. But the growing feeling that rock music was beginning to get scarce was only enhanced when I picked up the nearly rock-less two-disc CD, Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women in Music in 1998. * * * However, that certainly was not true of all of the female musicians in that time period. Though I was slow to get the details, I was starting to hear about the rumblings of the “riot grrrl” movement, a female offshoot of punk rock; about all I had actually heard in the early days is the 1992 hit “Pretend We’re Dead” by a band called L7 (slang for “square”). Singer/guitarist Corin Tucker was in Heavens to Betsy, one of many early riot grrrl rock duos. The fact that only two people could create such a big sound was a revelation and led to a slew of other two-member rock bands in the years to come. Classically trained pianist Carrie Brownstein (also a vocalist and guitarist) met Tucker in 1992 and was so inspired by her and other early riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill that she started her own grrrl band, Excuse 17. What began as a side project between the two of them became a full-fledged band with the addition of drummer Lora MacFarlane; MacFarlane was replaced by the third album with another drummer, Janet Weiss. The arrival of Sleater-Kinney’s lo-fi–looking first album in 1995, Sleater-Kinney (appropriately released on a label called Chainsaw Records) quickly established them as one of the finest feminist punk rock bands of that period. Each album brought them greater fame and a more widespread fan base; by the beginning of the new millennium, Sleater-Kinney had enough mainstream appeal that Time magazine named them America’s best rock band in a 2001 issue. Their 2002 album, One Beat is one of my very favorite albums of the 2000’s decade. * * * With all of that as background, the first hint that garage rock might at long last find widespread appeal came with the 1998 release of the first album, The White Stripes by the rock duo the White Stripes. At first guitarist and vocalist Jack White and drummer Meg White pretended to be brother and sister (they were actually previously married; the members of the new wave band Eurythmics, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were also former lovers), causing Rolling Stone magazine to run a tongue-in-cheek cover story on the band: “The White Stripes: The New Carpenters?”. * * * The White Stripes’ third album, White Blood Cells, featured hit songs like “Fell in Love with a Girl” (the video for this song that used animated Legos is one of the most amazing that I have ever seen) and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”. Besides having a definite retro attitude in his music, Jack White also used vintage microphones, instruments and amplifiers in recording his music. While there had been a few two-person rock bands over the years – such as House of Freaks, a band from Richmond, Virginia that formed in 1986 – the power trio of guitar, bass and drums is about as small as most rock bands were previously willing to go. Being able to successfully pull off a rock duo requires an adept drummer; but Meg White, for one, is more than equal to the task. Jack White has since formed another successful rock band called the Raconteurs. He also performed music for the 2003 Civil War-era film Cold Mountain and even had an acting role; for a time, Jack White dated one of his co-stars, Renée Zellweger. This was a hint of White’s appreciation for classic country music as well: He master-minded acclaimed comeback albums for two different country legends, Loretta Lynn for her 2004 album Van Lear Rose; and Wanda Jackson, the “Queen of Rockabilly” in her 2011 release, The Party Ain’t Over. Jackson has a concert scheduled at the nearby Hollywood Casino in Bay St. Louis next month, and I can’t tell you how excited I am at the prospects of seeing her! * * * I told the story of seeing Queens of the Stone Age with my wife Peggy in my last post; but their third album in 2002, Songs for the Deaf is probably when I realized that something was really going on out there in the larger world: rock music with a modern sound but with garage-rock roots. The Queens had a rotating line-up of like-minded musicians and grew out an earlier band with similar sensibilities called Kyuss; while they didn’t sell a lot of albums, they were a pioneer of the stoner-rock scene of the 1990’s. As Allmusic describes the band: “[T]he signature sound [of] Kyuss [combined] the doom heaviness of Black Sabbath, the feedback fuzz of Blue Cheer, and the space rock of Hawkwind, infused with psychedelic flashes, massive grooves, and a surprising sensibility for punk rock, metal, and thrash.” The connective tissue between the two bands is multi-instrumentalist Josh Homme, who also founded the popular Eagles of Death Metal. * * * Two other bands came along at about the same time with songs on MTV that I really liked; they even had similar names: the Vines and the Hives. At the annual MTV Music Video Awards telecast in 2002, the two bands had back-to-back performances that were simply wonderful. As it turned out, it was just the one song on the Vines album, Highly Evolved that really had that garage-rock style, but the Hives kept releasing one great album after another. Also, their live shows have been rated by Spin magazine as the 8th greatest ever. The Black and White Album above is the only one by the Hives that I actually own, but I am sure looking hard for others. * * * So now we have come full circle: The garage rock movement that had been churning along below the radar for close to 40 years broke out into the larger world as the Garage Rock Revival for a few years in the early 2000’s. One of the CD’s that I unwrapped recently was one of those sale-priced Bomp! CD’s that I’d been ordering over the past year or so, because it was on their Alive label. It was entitled, boringly enough, The Sound of San Francisco; it was a collection from 2003 of songs from brand new bands in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, the music on The Sound of San Francisco is anything but boring: one great band after another that started with that raw garage-rock sound, but each working hard in their own style. I would view this 2003 album as documenting one of the first wave of bands that were directly influenced by the Garage Rock Revival – it was released in the year after the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” single and the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf album were released, as well as the mini-battle of the bands between the Hives and the Vines on the MTV Music Video Awards. I have full albums by a couple of the bands on this album, Big Midnight and Boyskout that are both excellent; each is likely to be a future UARB. Numerous other similar bands have come along in the years to follow; the CD from last month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, the Invisible Eyes was released in 2005 and would I think be another of this wave of new bands influenced by the Garage Rock Revival. * * * But it wasn’t just the little guys; rock started to be seen as cool again in the larger world of popular music. In 2004, the Black Eyed Peas scored their first big hit song with “Let’s Get it Started” that seemed to be about equal parts rock and hip hop, instead of the amalgamation leaning heavily to one side or another. Rock bands started appearing regularly at country music awards shows. With rock music pretty much cut out of hit-oriented radio stations, hard rock music became the soundtrack for numerous television ads. One of the first that I remember was when Royal Caribbean Cruises used as their signature song “Lust for Life” by Iggy Pop, right after Peggy and I had our honeymoon on one of their ships in late 2003. I have been hearing one of my favorite Queens of the Stone Age songs backing a TV ad currently (for T-Mobile?). * * * The king of all of the new garage-y bands is probably the blues-rock duo the Black Keys (sometimes viewed as a sort of twin of the White Stripes) whose debut album, The Big Come-Up came out in 2002 and is the largest selling album that the Bomp! family of record labels has ever had – Alive Records in this case. They have released several more albums since on other labels; like Sleater-Kinney, each Black Keys album seems to be better than the one that preceded it and has brought them greater fame and a wider audience. The Black Keys won three Grammy Awards at the 2011 Grammy Awards from their album Brothers that also includes their hit single “Tighten Up” that made the top of the Alternative Rock Charts. For the 2013 Grammy Awards next month, they have five nominations derived from their most recent album, El Camino. The Black Keys in fact have become so mainstream that I was astounded to see the band profiled last year on the CBS Sunday Morning show that is hosted by Charles Osgood. During their interview, the bandmembers mentioned that their music has also been featured in numerous TV ads. That used to be seen as the ultimate sell-out, but no longer. * * * Mick Farren – a founder of two of my all-time favorite bands, the Deviants and the Pink Fairies – wrote the liner notes to The Sound of San Francisco, which are entitled “Remember You Heard it Here First”. (I’ve talked about him a lot in these posts, so you should see a photo of him; this is from one of his early solo albums, Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). They started out this way: Everyone knows the old joke. Q What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend? A Homeless Mick Farren was trying to make a point though with this old joke, and it was a poignant one; his liner notes continued: “Maybe there was a utopian time when musicians could expect to support their survival by playing rock & roll, but I don’t recall so much as meeting anybody who could remember such a golden age. Even cats with record deals must sometimes fall back on phonesales, breaking and entering, or find themselves doing 24 months for possession with intent to sell; and the girls might go out lap-dancing or dealing blackjack to make ends meet in hard times or moments of self-inflicted disaster. Such has been the material reality of all but that highly publicized, but tiny one percent of rockers who find themselves elevated to MTV, witless stardom, and access to every vice known to man, woman, and several domestic animals.” * * * Actually, I hadn't heard that old joke, but I knew such a drummer. A group of kids from my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC formed a rock band called the dB’s; they were unabashedly Beatlesque in a time period (late 1970’s) when that wasn’t fashionable at all, but they were very talented, particularly at songwriting. The drummer for the dB’s was and still is Will Rigby, the son of a good friend of my mother’s. Even though they were in a quasi-successful rock band, my mom told me once that Will never could afford an apartment in New York and was always bumming around from apartment to apartment with his friends up there. Eventually they got a record deal; the critics loved them, and they had decent record sales in England, but not much over here. Then they got another record deal, and then they got yet another record deal – the last time was with R.E.M.’s label I.R.S. Records (which stands for “International Recording Syndicate”, like the band’s name stands for “the decibels”). That I.R.S. album, The Sound of Music was a slick pop affair that came out in 1987. A lot of bands from the Carolinas were doing well nationally, and everyone expected that to be their breakthrough album. (Original member and ace songwriter Chris Stamey had left the band by then and was trying to establish a solo career). The above is actually the back cover of the album; that’s Will Rigby on the left of course at the drumset, with Peter Holsapple (songwriter and guitarist), Gene Holder (bass guitar – I remember him from my schooldays also), and new member Jeff Beninato (guitar). Fame didn’t happen for them though, although Peter Holsapple started playing a lot with R.E.M. for several years after that. I read recently in Wikipedia that the dB’s have reformed and released a new album in June 2012 called Falling Off the Sky. * * * I am reminded of comedian Bill Hicks; he was one of several stand-up comedians who were starting to fill up arenas in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were doing so well that many were comparing them with rock stars. Also, like rock stars, several of them died tragically young, Hicks among them, along with Sam Kinison. Anyway, I saw a documentary about Bill Hicks not long after his death, and several of his friends and colleagues mentioned that Hicks was the man who told you the truth, however painful that was. He had a long rant in his act that was on HBO and elsewhere that started out: “Drugs”. This was in the wake of Nancy Reagan’s surprisingly successful “Just Say No” campaign that had just about driven even marijuana back into the deep underground. As an example, in case you’d forgotten, MTV censored the word “joint” in Tom Petty’s harmless 1994 hit song “You Don’t Know How It Feels”; and Warner Bros. Records refused to include the B-side of the single, “Girl on L.S.D.” on the accompanying hit album, Wildflowers. Bill Hicks told everyone how omnipresent drug use was in our culture, that alcohol was just another drug, that everyone who hated drugs ought to go home and throw out all of their rock records, because that’s where all of that great music had come from, etc., etc. * * * It was sad, really, to read all of this truth via Mick Farren, who has himself delivered a dozen albums full of fantastic music into my collection: “And every three or four years a new and energetic crop comes out of the garages and into the streets, the serious new meat on those same sidewalks of Hank Williams’ lost highway, earning their tattoos, both physical and meta-physical, until, after heaven only knows how many of these generations, every city on the planet worth a damn; London, New York, Detroit or Tokyo, or, in this case, San Francisco has an awesome talent pool of renegade rock music and rolling musicians discovering that fame is the Crapshoot of the Gods, and maybe the best to be hoped for is a good following around the bars and enough songs recorded to leave a legacy of how it sounded back in the day. . . . I’ve been on this waterfront too long to handicap any musical fates, dire or divine, that’s for idiot TV talent shows. What will be will be for all of those assembled on this CD. Just remember you heard them here first.” Mick Farren writes a lot of stuff; he has several science fiction novels to his credit, including a trilogy called The DNA Cowboys. Along with Greg Shaw’s ex-wife and business partner Suzy Shaw, Mick Farren co-wrote the 2007 book that cements Shaw’s legacy in the rock and roll universe, Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time. I have seen numerous articles by Farren in the Village Voice and elsewhere. But I can only recall one other time when Mick Farren wrote liner notes; that was for the comeback album for his old band the Pink Fairies, specifically their 1987 release Kill ’Em and Eat ’Em. And for the most part, that is where my roster of Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Under-Appreciated Rock Artists has arisen: from songs haltingly written and gleefully performed and hopefully released and mostly ignored. By the time you hear me talk about them, the UARA’s and UARB’s have normally long since disappeared or been absorbed into other musical projects or left the music business altogether. * * * This month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, the Skywalkers is another rock band that seems to have been influenced by the Garage Rock Revival – or more properly by the entire garage rock scene. (January 2013)
The British Invasion caught American recording artists flat-footed; they were not used to any overseas competition to speak of. Creedence Clearwater Revival and a revitalized Beach Boys are two of the responses by American recording artists to the British Invasion. But that was hardly the only reaction: American teenagers (mostly white suburban kids) were also invigorated by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all the rest; and they responded by launching a counter-assault, when seemingly every kid in America wanted to be in a band. This era is now known as the garage rock era (that was the most available practice space for most of these would-be rock stars, hence the name); this time period also saw the beginnings of the psychedelic rock movement on both sides of the Atlantic. I didn’t know exactly what I was hearing at the time, but the music by bands like the Seeds, Blues Magoos, the Electric Prunes, Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Standells, Count Five, and Strawberry Alarm Clock (among many other bands) was grabbing me almost immediately. I don’t know that I even realized immediately how bizarre many of these American band names were, as compared to those of British Invasion bands like the Animals, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Dave Clark Five.
Thankfully, in 1972 (though if I’m not mistaken, the album was actually not released in the US until 1976), Lenny Kaye – later the guitarist for the seminal Patti Smith Group – helped assemble hit songs by all of these diverse bands plus plenty more into what is now regarded as one of the greatest compilation albums of all times: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. It remains one of my favorite records, and I have spoken of it several times before in these posts.
* * *
But that turned out to be just the beginning. Though many other Nuggets compilation albums would follow that concentrated on the better-known American bands of the garage rock era, it remained for music historian and legendary record collector Greg Shaw to begin to unearth an astonishing wealth of 45’s released by local American bands on tiny labels that almost no one had heard of before. Beginning in 1978, and under the Pebbles name, Shaw’s AIP label and his alias BFD label put out close to 100 compilation albums. While the Nuggets bands had the backing of major record labels, a lot of the Pebbles songs sounded like they had actually been recorded in a garage.
But it wasn’t just garage rock and psychedelic rock either: The Pebbles, Volume 4 LP and the Pebbles, Volume 4 CD showcased rare surf music, illustrating that there was a lot more to the surf scene than the mellow sounds that were hitting the radio in those days by the likes of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean; while the Pebbles, Volume 6 LP – subtitled “The Roots of Mod” – included several rare British beat bands. Greg Shaw later followed up with that album with the now-deleted English Freakbeat Series.
Greg Shaw’s Pebbles output also included a vinyl-only series called Highs in the Mid-Sixties – which was nearly as long as the original Pebbles series and focused on particular states and regions – plus a subset of Pebbles called The Continent Lashes Back that put the spotlight on music from continental Europe. The Netherlands in particular has a rich musical scene that rivals the UK.
In the decades since, many hundreds if not thousands of additional garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums have been released from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of unknown 45’s, not just from America but from around the world.
Though punk rock had already begun to take off, many critics argue that Pebbles, even more than Nuggets helped launch the raw sounds that kept the movement going into the 1980’s and beyond. Besides launching a 4-disk Nuggets Box Set covering the original double-LP and other songs of that period, a second Nuggets box set covering lesser known British and continental European music was also released, called Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969; many of these songs originally appeared on the Pebbles albums. There was also a third box set – Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era - 1976-1995 – highlighting the bands (mostly from the 1980’s) that were inspired by the Nuggets and Pebbles music to develop their own sounds. Perhaps, in response to the Garage Rock Revival, there might be a Grandchildren of Nuggets box set in the future.
* * *
I was first introduced to the raw 1960’s sounds of Dutch rock when I was fortunate enough to find a copy of a compilation album called Searching in the Wilderness in about 1987 in a fondly remembered basement-level New York record store called Underground Records in the Village. (There was at least one and maybe two other record stores in that same space over the years). Though much of the early output from Dutch bands was heavily influenced by Merseybeat sounds almost to the point of aping them, that was most definitely not true of two of the tracks on that album: “Chunk of Steel”, an early single by Golden Earring; and “For Another Man” by the Motions, which included the future bandleader of Shocking Blue, Robbie van Leeuwen. Wilderness was also my first introduction to other excellent Dutch bands, like the Outsiders (not the American band called the Outsiders that is best known for “Time Won’t Let Me”) and Cuby & the Blizzards.
Golden Earring (originally known as the Golden Earrings or the Golden Ear-Rings) formed in 1961 and are still together – yes, you read that right: before the Rolling Stones formed, and before Ringo Starr joined the Beatles. The band had numerous hits in their native Netherlands throughout the 1960’s. The first time I heard Golden Earring was at a party while I was in college (around 1970), where someone was playing their cover of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, a song that simply screamed out to be given a side-long extended jam like the one that this band put together.
Golden Earring later had an international hit song in 1973 with “Radar Love”, one of the great road songs that I still hear regularly on the radio. In 1982, they had another big hit with “Twilight Zone”; their fabulous, high-concept video intermingled a spy story that featured a topless model, callous treatment of a dead body, and a brutal injection of some sort of drug by a dancing vixen; along with concert footage and several arty shots. The video for their follow-up hit in 1984, “When the Lady Smiles” was just as controversial; it featured a sexual attack on a nun that showed black lingerie under her habit. I probably have a dozen of their albums, and they are all enjoyable.
Another Dutch band, Focus also had a string of albums released in this country and is fairly well known for their 1971 instrumental hit “Hocus Pocus”.
* * *
I am pretty sure that I must have heard a track or two by the Dutch progressive rock band Ekseption on college radio back in the day; otherwise, I don’t know how Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” would sound so familiar to me. Their virtuoso bandleader Rick van der Linden was a wizard at combining classical music forms with rock, but that statement alone doesn’t do justice to their music: Every album was good, and they were also quite different from one another. The opening track on their self-titled debut album in 1969, Ekseption (which also included “Sabre Dance”) – simply called “The 5th” – is based on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This might be the first pop treatment of the symphony, though there have been many others over the years. One of the Electric Light Orchestra’s earliest hits is a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” that incorporated some parts of the symphony; and then of course, there is the disco version called “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy. Unlike the others though – which mainly focused on the “da da da DUM” opening – Ekseption actually incorporated significant portions of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a more complete work. (I had always heard that the opening was based on Morse Code for the letter “V”, standing for “victory” – not to mention the roman numeral V for Fifth – but evidently, the symphony predated the development of the Morse Code).
* * *
The three Dutch albums in The Continent Lashes Back sub-series within the Pebbles albums put me onto several more, and I found some other real rarities via the Bomp! mailorder store. I just cleaned up a second 10-inch album among several that I mail-ordered years ago out of an extended series. I even picked up some “Nederpop” records on my trip to Europe (and not just in Amsterdam), including several by Shocking Blue of “Venus” fame, and a band that I have written about several times previously.
* * *
As punk rock and new wave rock ran its course, alternative rock started up in the 1980’s; and that also kept the popular music world rocking on into the 1990’s, even as other forms of music began intruding into rock’s hegemony, such as hip hop and country. MTV had long since come to terms with rap music and hip hop, but their VJ’s were always chagrined when they kept having to report that the Number One album in the country was by Garth Brooks, probably the most successful crossover artist in popular music history.
I was starting to listen to more country music myself by the late 1970’s; I was happily discovering country’s roots such as the Original Carter Family and Hank Williams Sr., and also a lot of the “outlaw country” crowd like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and David Allan Coe. Many of the earliest alt-country artists also caught my ear (before anyone was even using the term), like Randy Travis, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang and Hank Williams III; and some were simply country-flavored rock bands such as the Georgia Satellites and the Kentucky Headhunters.
One thing that has really impressed me in country music is the recent emergence, finally, of genuine country bands – instead of just a singer or singers backed by musicians – like Lady Antebellum and the Band Perry. As I remember it, for seemingly ages, the Statler Brothers, and then Alabama kept winning the Grammy for Best Country Duo or Group simply because there really was no one else doing that.
As what I think of as alternative rock began to run out of gas in the 1990’s, the next movement was sometimes called modern rock (though I hear few references to that term anymore), which featured bands and artists like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Slayer, Pantera and others. A lot of these bands created a combustible mixture of heavy metal and rap music, and one in particular I really liked, Rage Against the Machine. Besides casting the existing heavy metal scene as a bunch of wimps, they giddily sought to overturn every connection to earlier forms of rock music and, for a time at least, appeared to be poised to sweep aside the rock establishment altogether. The movement seemed to me to rise and fall rather quickly, but frankly, those artists never really spoke to me except on a few stray tracks.
What I remember most fondly about the 1990’s is the bumper crop of fine female singer-songwriters and rockers: Joan Osborne, Fiona Apple, Lisa Loeb, Shawn Colvin, Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Paula Cole, and just too many more to name. There was even a series of three music festivals beginning in 1997 that were spearheaded by Sarah McLachlan, called Lilith Fair. But the growing feeling that rock music was beginning to get scarce was only enhanced when I picked up the nearly rock-less two-disc CD, Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women in Music in 1998.
* * *
However, that certainly was not true of all of the female musicians in that time period. Though I was slow to get the details, I was starting to hear about the rumblings of the “riot grrrl” movement, a female offshoot of punk rock; about all I had actually heard in the early days is the 1992 hit “Pretend We’re Dead” by a band called L7 (slang for “square”). Singer/guitarist Corin Tucker was in Heavens to Betsy, one of many early riot grrrl rock duos. The fact that only two people could create such a big sound was a revelation and led to a slew of other two-member rock bands in the years to come. Classically trained pianist Carrie Brownstein (also a vocalist and guitarist) met Tucker in 1992 and was so inspired by her and other early riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill that she started her own grrrl band, Excuse 17. What began as a side project between the two of them became a full-fledged band with the addition of drummer Lora MacFarlane; MacFarlane was replaced by the third album with another drummer, Janet Weiss. The arrival of Sleater-Kinney’s lo-fi–looking first album in 1995, Sleater-Kinney (appropriately released on a label called Chainsaw Records) quickly established them as one of the finest feminist punk rock bands of that period. Each album brought them greater fame and a more widespread fan base; by the beginning of the new millennium, Sleater-Kinney had enough mainstream appeal that Time magazine named them America’s best rock band in a 2001 issue. Their 2002 album, One Beat is one of my very favorite albums of the 2000’s decade.
* * *
With all of that as background, the first hint that garage rock might at long last find widespread appeal came with the 1998 release of the first album, The White Stripes by the rock duo the White Stripes. At first guitarist and vocalist Jack White and drummer Meg White pretended to be brother and sister (they were actually previously married; the members of the new wave band Eurythmics, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were also former lovers), causing Rolling Stone magazine to run a tongue-in-cheek cover story on the band: “The White Stripes: The New Carpenters?”.
* * *
The White Stripes’ third album, White Blood Cells, featured hit songs like “Fell in Love with a Girl” (the video for this song that used animated Legos is one of the most amazing that I have ever seen) and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”. Besides having a definite retro attitude in his music, Jack White also used vintage microphones, instruments and amplifiers in recording his music. While there had been a few two-person rock bands over the years – such as House of Freaks, a band from Richmond, Virginia that formed in 1986 – the power trio of guitar, bass and drums is about as small as most rock bands were previously willing to go. Being able to successfully pull off a rock duo requires an adept drummer; but Meg White, for one, is more than equal to the task.
Jack White has since formed another successful rock band called the Raconteurs. He also performed music for the 2003 Civil War-era film Cold Mountain and even had an acting role; for a time, Jack White dated one of his co-stars, Renée Zellweger. This was a hint of White’s appreciation for classic country music as well: He master-minded acclaimed comeback albums for two different country legends, Loretta Lynn for her 2004 album Van Lear Rose; and Wanda Jackson, the “Queen of Rockabilly” in her 2011 release, The Party Ain’t Over. Jackson has a concert scheduled at the nearby Hollywood Casino in Bay St. Louis next month, and I can’t tell you how excited I am at the prospects of seeing her!
* * *
I told the story of seeing Queens of the Stone Age with my wife Peggy in my last post; but their third album in 2002, Songs for the Deaf is probably when I realized that something was really going on out there in the larger world: rock music with a modern sound but with garage-rock roots. The Queens had a rotating line-up of like-minded musicians and grew out an earlier band with similar sensibilities called Kyuss; while they didn’t sell a lot of albums, they were a pioneer of the stoner-rock scene of the 1990’s. As Allmusic describes the band: “[T]he signature sound [of] Kyuss [combined] the doom heaviness of Black Sabbath, the feedback fuzz of Blue Cheer, and the space rock of Hawkwind, infused with psychedelic flashes, massive grooves, and a surprising sensibility for punk rock, metal, and thrash.” The connective tissue between the two bands is multi-instrumentalist Josh Homme, who also founded the popular Eagles of Death Metal.
* * *
Two other bands came along at about the same time with songs on MTV that I really liked; they even had similar names: the Vines and the Hives. At the annual MTV Music Video Awards telecast in 2002, the two bands had back-to-back performances that were simply wonderful. As it turned out, it was just the one song on the Vines album, Highly Evolved that really had that garage-rock style, but the Hives kept releasing one great album after another. Also, their live shows have been rated by Spin magazine as the 8th greatest ever. The Black and White Album above is the only one by the Hives that I actually own, but I am sure looking hard for others.
* * *
So now we have come full circle: The garage rock movement that had been churning along below the radar for close to 40 years broke out into the larger world as the Garage Rock Revival for a few years in the early 2000’s. One of the CD’s that I unwrapped recently was one of those sale-priced Bomp! CD’s that I’d been ordering over the past year or so, because it was on their Alive label. It was entitled, boringly enough, The Sound of San Francisco; it was a collection from 2003 of songs from brand new bands in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, the music on The Sound of San Francisco is anything but boring: one great band after another that started with that raw garage-rock sound, but each working hard in their own style.
I would view this 2003 album as documenting one of the first wave of bands that were directly influenced by the Garage Rock Revival – it was released in the year after the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” single and the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf album were released, as well as the mini-battle of the bands between the Hives and the Vines on the MTV Music Video Awards.
I have full albums by a couple of the bands on this album, Big Midnight and Boyskout that are both excellent; each is likely to be a future UARB. Numerous other similar bands have come along in the years to follow; the CD from last month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, the Invisible Eyes was released in 2005 and would I think be another of this wave of new bands influenced by the Garage Rock Revival.
* * *
But it wasn’t just the little guys; rock started to be seen as cool again in the larger world of popular music. In 2004, the Black Eyed Peas scored their first big hit song with “Let’s Get it Started” that seemed to be about equal parts rock and hip hop, instead of the amalgamation leaning heavily to one side or another. Rock bands started appearing regularly at country music awards shows. With rock music pretty much cut out of hit-oriented radio stations, hard rock music became the soundtrack for numerous television ads. One of the first that I remember was when Royal Caribbean Cruises used as their signature song “Lust for Life” by Iggy Pop, right after Peggy and I had our honeymoon on one of their ships in late 2003. I have been hearing one of my favorite Queens of the Stone Age songs backing a TV ad currently (for T-Mobile?).
* * *
The king of all of the new garage-y bands is probably the blues-rock duo the Black Keys (sometimes viewed as a sort of twin of the White Stripes) whose debut album, The Big Come-Up came out in 2002 and is the largest selling album that the Bomp! family of record labels has ever had – Alive Records in this case. They have released several more albums since on other labels; like Sleater-Kinney, each Black Keys album seems to be better than the one that preceded it and has brought them greater fame and a wider audience. The Black Keys won three Grammy Awards at the 2011 Grammy Awards from their album Brothers that also includes their hit single “Tighten Up” that made the top of the Alternative Rock Charts. For the 2013 Grammy Awards next month, they have five nominations derived from their most recent album, El Camino.
The Black Keys in fact have become so mainstream that I was astounded to see the band profiled last year on the CBS Sunday Morning show that is hosted by Charles Osgood. During their interview, the bandmembers mentioned that their music has also been featured in numerous TV ads. That used to be seen as the ultimate sell-out, but no longer.
* * *
Mick Farren – a founder of two of my all-time favorite bands, the Deviants and the Pink Fairies – wrote the liner notes to The Sound of San Francisco, which are entitled “Remember You Heard it Here First”. (I’ve talked about him a lot in these posts, so you should see a photo of him; this is from one of his early solo albums, Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). They started out this way:
Everyone knows the old joke.
Q What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?
A Homeless
Mick Farren was trying to make a point though with this old joke, and it was a poignant one; his liner notes continued: “Maybe there was a utopian time when musicians could expect to support their survival by playing rock & roll, but I don’t recall so much as meeting anybody who could remember such a golden age. Even cats with record deals must sometimes fall back on phonesales, breaking and entering, or find themselves doing 24 months for possession with intent to sell; and the girls might go out lap-dancing or dealing blackjack to make ends meet in hard times or moments of self-inflicted disaster. Such has been the material reality of all but that highly publicized, but tiny one percent of rockers who find themselves elevated to MTV, witless stardom, and access to every vice known to man, woman, and several domestic animals.”
* * *
Actually, I hadn't heard that old joke, but I knew such a drummer. A group of kids from my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC formed a rock band called the dB’s; they were unabashedly Beatlesque in a time period (late 1970’s) when that wasn’t fashionable at all, but they were very talented, particularly at songwriting.
The drummer for the dB’s was and still is Will Rigby, the son of a good friend of my mother’s. Even though they were in a quasi-successful rock band, my mom told me once that Will never could afford an apartment in New York and was always bumming around from apartment to apartment with his friends up there.
Eventually they got a record deal; the critics loved them, and they had decent record sales in England, but not much over here. Then they got another record deal, and then they got yet another record deal – the last time was with R.E.M.’s label I.R.S. Records (which stands for “International Recording Syndicate”, like the band’s name stands for “the decibels”).
That I.R.S. album, The Sound of Music was a slick pop affair that came out in 1987. A lot of bands from the Carolinas were doing well nationally, and everyone expected that to be their breakthrough album. (Original member and ace songwriter Chris Stamey had left the band by then and was trying to establish a solo career). The above is actually the back cover of the album; that’s Will Rigby on the left of course at the drumset, with Peter Holsapple (songwriter and guitarist), Gene Holder (bass guitar – I remember him from my schooldays also), and new member Jeff Beninato (guitar). Fame didn’t happen for them though, although Peter Holsapple started playing a lot with R.E.M. for several years after that. I read recently in Wikipedia that the dB’s have reformed and released a new album in June 2012 called Falling Off the Sky.
* * *
I am reminded of comedian Bill Hicks; he was one of several stand-up comedians who were starting to fill up arenas in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were doing so well that many were comparing them with rock stars. Also, like rock stars, several of them died tragically young, Hicks among them, along with Sam Kinison. Anyway, I saw a documentary about Bill Hicks not long after his death, and several of his friends and colleagues mentioned that Hicks was the man who told you the truth, however painful that was. He had a long rant in his act that was on HBO and elsewhere that started out: “Drugs”. This was in the wake of Nancy Reagan’s surprisingly successful “Just Say No” campaign that had just about driven even marijuana back into the deep underground. As an example, in case you’d forgotten, MTV censored the word “joint” in Tom Petty’s harmless 1994 hit song “You Don’t Know How It Feels”; and Warner Bros. Records refused to include the B-side of the single, “Girl on L.S.D.” on the accompanying hit album, Wildflowers. Bill Hicks told everyone how omnipresent drug use was in our culture, that alcohol was just another drug, that everyone who hated drugs ought to go home and throw out all of their rock records, because that’s where all of that great music had come from, etc., etc.
* * *
It was sad, really, to read all of this truth via Mick Farren, who has himself delivered a dozen albums full of fantastic music into my collection: “And every three or four years a new and energetic crop comes out of the garages and into the streets, the serious new meat on those same sidewalks of Hank Williams’ lost highway, earning their tattoos, both physical and meta-physical, until, after heaven only knows how many of these generations, every city on the planet worth a damn; London, New York, Detroit or Tokyo, or, in this case, San Francisco has an awesome talent pool of renegade rock music and rolling musicians discovering that fame is the Crapshoot of the Gods, and maybe the best to be hoped for is a good following around the bars and enough songs recorded to leave a legacy of how it sounded back in the day. . . . I’ve been on this waterfront too long to handicap any musical fates, dire or divine, that’s for idiot TV talent shows. What will be will be for all of those assembled on this CD. Just remember you heard them here first.”
Mick Farren writes a lot of stuff; he has several science fiction novels to his credit, including a trilogy called The DNA Cowboys. Along with Greg Shaw’s ex-wife and business partner Suzy Shaw, Mick Farren co-wrote the 2007 book that cements Shaw’s legacy in the rock and roll universe, Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time. I have seen numerous articles by Farren in the Village Voice and elsewhere. But I can only recall one other time when Mick Farren wrote liner notes; that was for the comeback album for his old band the Pink Fairies, specifically their 1987 release Kill ’Em and Eat ’Em.
And for the most part, that is where my roster of Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Under-Appreciated Rock Artists has arisen: from songs haltingly written and gleefully performed and hopefully released and mostly ignored. By the time you hear me talk about them, the UARA’s and UARB’s have normally long since disappeared or been absorbed into other musical projects or left the music business altogether.
* * *
This month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, the Skywalkers is another rock band that seems to have been influenced by the Garage Rock Revival – or more properly by the entire garage rock scene.
(January 2013)
* * *
Items: Garage Rock Revival
