COUNT FIVE
Count Five was an American 1960’s garage rock band from San Jose, California, best known for their Top 10 single “Psychotic Reaction”. (More from Wikipedia)
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.
(January 2013)
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Mouse and the Traps later backed a singer named Jimmy Rabbitt on a cover of “Psychotic Reaction”, a hit song recorded by Count Five. The song was released under the name Positively 13 O’Clock; this is a Bob Dylan reference as well: The band name was adapted from his hit song “Positively 4th Street”. Their version of “Psychotic Reaction” was included on the very first Pebbles album.
(September 2013)
