Posted by
Eric Reanimator July 10, 2007 -
476 views
I was gonna say something about my first time getting garage rock... but I then I remembered that this is the Garage... Punk..... hideout, so maybe I should say something about my first time with the garage punk... It was the late 80's and I was a teenage...and my brother and I had rented this flick called Dudes... a punk western, that featured a soundtrack made up of a mix of punk and metal. The punk stuff was what caught my ear, but the metal was the stuff that I could find in my local record shops... did I mention that I grew up in Ann Arbor MI, which I have in the past called the birthplace of punk,... but the truth is that it was the birthplace of Proto-Punk... meaning the home of The Stooges and for at least part of their history The MC5..
Anyway, the Dudes soundtrack, it was one of the best intros to non-mainstream music that you could ever find. Like I said punk and metal.. but there was some of what would be called Alternative on there as well (The Leather Nun, Janes Addition), but it was the punk that I really keyed into. The Vandals with their classic Urban Struggle, what a killer tune, straight ahead energy filled basic punk madness with a sing a long chorus. The Little Kings, I really don't know much about these guys, I have a copy of their tape somewhere, it's got a couple of solid tracks, however their tune on the Dudes soundtrack is solid, Lost Highway, it's melodic and has a drive and it even references a classic country tune (which I didn't realize for years)... and finally there was Legal Weapon. One of my all time fave bands. If you have heard them, they were a great melodic punk rock group with hints of blues and country in their sound. Their first album Death Of Innocence is a classic that doesn't get much press, but is a great album (btw Cocksparrer's Shock Troops is another one). There track on the soundtrack is a cowpunk ballad called 'Time Forgot You' that I am sure will be played at my funeral if I have anything to say about it. It was this little collection of tunes that really started to draw me away from the hits of the day, and started to suck me into the underground... and almost everything that I really got in to after hearing that soundtrack can be traced back to what I heard there ..... until...
It was the mid 90's and I was in a grunge hangover... there I said it, I was into a lot of that stuff.. anyway, my life, well it wasn't on the same track that it seemed like everyone around me was...I was in college and so I was able to fly under the radar, but I had become a blown Rock Fiend, and stumbled across a copy of the soundtrack to the movie Return of the Living Dead (the first one of course) which was my gateway into the world of horror punk. To this day it's still a fave, collecting tracks from garage punk icons like : The Cramps... Roky Erickson, The Damned.... sure they weren't the most classic tracks by any of them, but still they were solid and hold up... Others on the soundtrack? 45 Grave, The Flesheaters, and the second line up of T.S.O.L. are names that are on the second tier in most peoples mind, that said I think that all of them are under rated in most circles.... all of these bands and tracks are listenable and.... ok maybe the 45 Grave and T.S.O.L. tracks are cheesy in hindsight.... but it was all worth it for 2 of the tracks I haven't mentioned yet...no not the SSQ track.... but those by The Jet Black Berries and The Tallboys.
First the Jet Black Berries (JBB for short), simply are one of my fave bands of all time. They started off as the power pop punk group called New Math. The evolved into a dark new wave style band, first as a dark droning garage group (and it was in this form that they recorded Love Under Will, which appears on the ROTLD Stk). Now I have to disclose that I helped to release a CD of New Math tracks at the end of the 1990's, so I am bias about them... anyway, they were on the cusp of a major label release when they didn't like the direction that they were going in, broke up and reformed as The Jet Black Berries. JBB were a cowpunk group, their first album was a spacewestern concept album that was dusty and dark and something that William S. Burrough might have come up with. They were heavily influenced by The Cramps (whom they opened for and were friends with) and The Gun Club. They released 3 records and each one is well worth rescuing from the $1 bins out there and playing once and a while.
Second, and these guys might really have been the ones that really got me looking towards Garage rock, The Tallboys. An off shoot of the UK Psychobilly Kingpins The Meteors, The Tallboys were combining punk, garage, rockabilly, and straight up rock and roll into a fun blast of raw powered horror inflected fun. The track from ROTLD, Take A Walk, is a rockabilly strut that isn't very horror, aside from Nigel Lewis's vox, but was just so energy filled that I had to listen to it over and over, and caused me to seek out their back catalog (there is a great comp of their stuff called Funtime, which includes a cover of the garage standard Action Woman). There was something in the deep vocals and the raunchy guitar sounds that drew me to the band... and as they say the rest is history.......
