MOUSE
Mouse and the Traps is the name of a garage rock band from Tyler, Texas that released numerous singles between 1965 and 1969, two of which, “A Public Execution” and “Sometimes You Just Can’t Win”, became large regional hits. The leader of the band, nicknamed “Mouse”, was Ronnie Weiss. Two of their best known songs, “A Public Execution” and a cover of “Psychotic Reaction”, are not actually credited to this band but, respectively, to simply Mouse and Positively 13 O’Clock (More from Wikipedia)
Reading between the lines, many of the songs on Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 were apparently chosen by what had hit the Top 100 at some point during that time period; that would explain the presence of the strangest of the songs, the closing track “It’s-a-Happening” by the Magic Mushrooms, which remarkably made it to something like #94 for a week. Even more intriguing to me were the songs that hadn’t hit the Top 100 at all. One immediate fave was “A Public Execution” by a Texas band called Mouse and the Traps (the song was officially issued under the name Mouse), doing something that I didn’t think would ever happen: someone else creating music along the lines of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and Highway 61 Revisited.
(January 2011)
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Back when Wikipedia was just a little over one-third its current size (as measured by the number of articles in the English-language version at least), I spotted a glaring hole in the rock band articles when I tried to look up something on Mouse and the Traps, a wonderful Texas garage rock band that I have long admired. (At that time, there were articles on maybe half of the bands on Nuggets). Their Nuggets entry “A Public Execution” sounds a lot like Bob Dylan, so you can imagine the appeal of that to me; as Lenny Kaye’s liner notes put it: “There are some who say that Mouse does Dylan”s Highway 61 period better than The Master himself”. On that band I found plenty on the Internet, including websites by at least one of the founding members of the group. Someone in the Wikipedia community even awarded me a Barnstar award for that “long awaited” (as they put it) article, and that sure felt good.
(December 2011)
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Mouse and the Traps was one of the first bands that I wrote about; they were featured on the original Nuggets album with their fabulous Bob Dylan soundalike song “A Public Execution” that was released under the name Mouse.
(September 2013)
