THE SOUND OF SAN FRANCISCO
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.
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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).
(January 2013)
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