Dec 14

Mouse and the Traps

Barely Appreciated

MOUSE AND THE TRAPS
 
 
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. 
 
The Magicians released three more singles on Columbia Records in 1966 and 1967, but none of them – including “An Invitation to Cry” – cracked the Top 100.  (Same with Mouse and the Traps though – they released even more singles, and their biggest hit “A Public Execution” got only to #125 nationally – so that doesn’t mean a thing to me). 
 
(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.  The band 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”.  It was quite a thrill when we moved to New York in early 1990, and I found that our first apartment was within sight of the western end of the street mentioned in this Dylan hit, West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village.  Their version of “Psychotic Reaction” was included on the very first Pebbles album. 

 

The only other band to be featured on the original Nuggets album and also on Pebbles, Volume 1 is the Shadows of Knight.  They are best known for their fantastic cover of “Gloria” that outsold the original “Gloria” by Van Morrison and Them in the United States.  The Nuggets song is their cover of a terrific Bo Diddley song, “Oh Yea”; while the Pebbles entry is a novelty song by the band called “Potato Chip” that was issued only on a flexi disc as part of some snack food promotion.  

 

What’s more, I had long owned a retrospective album by Mouse and the Traps called Public Execution, and all of the songs on the album were great, particularly “Maid of Sugar, Maid of Spice”, which was their failed second single following “A Public Execution”.  I truly could not believe that no one had written up an article on Mouse and the Traps yet.  This Wikipedia article won an “Original Barnstar” award by another Wikipedian, who praised me for this “long overdue” article.  It can be seen at:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_and_the_Traps . 

 

(September 2013)

 

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Homer was fortunate enough to record their single at Robin Hood Studios in Tyler, Texas, which was managed by Robin “Hood” Brians.  ZZ Top recorded their debut album, ZZ Top’s First Album at this studio, and Mouse and the Traps laid down their early tracks there as well, including their Dylanesque classic “A Public Execution”.  

 

(April 2014)

 

Last edited: April 3, 2021