Music
Genre Theory: Garage Rock
In the first blog for Genre Theory, which looks at misunderstood or criminally underappreciated musical genres, Tom Rollins rewinds the clock back to the 60s in time for the wah-wah pedal, acid, and garage rock.
Here’s a good one!…The Beatles arrive at JFK 7th February 1964, screams, fainting, banners, “THEY’RE COMING! British Invasion!” Then The Stones, The Who, The Animals, The Zombies. Then teenyboppers in tight bobs, beehives and black-leather boots. Then what?
History is a fickle ole thing, and no less so with the 1960s, the decade perhaps more than any other made sickly sweet with the candied romanticism of television documentaries, second-rate pop lit and one helluvah awful Richard Curtis film. This official history goes – Beatles drop on America, British Invasion, LSD drops on campus, Vietnam, Woodstock, and soon enough you end up at Altamont with one Stones fan dead. Wowie zowie, what a trip man! But – of course – there are gaps, and big ones too.
Garage rock only truly emerged after the British Invasion. The latest episode in the ongoing show-and-tell between British and American popular music, young bands began popping up everywhere stateside, emulating the blues/R’n’B (beat) sound that’d been emerging from British art schools and blues clubs since the early ‘60s. They began emulating. Similar haircuts, similar sounds, similar styles. Hence ‘Sweet Young Thing’:
It was a 1966 hit for Californian group The Chocolate Watchband. As well as the paint-it-black-guitar, isn’t that Jagger barking: “you sweeyt yung thhhaaang”?
But that was 1966. Up until then it had largely been saxophone rock’n’roll in the gymnasium. (Exception to the rule – The Sonics). It was difficult for US bands to get gigs without wearing suits on-stage until the early ‘60s, and around the same time Neil Young was kicked out of a club in Ontario for having his hair too long.
But not in 1966. 1966 was the year garage took off. For one, it got popular. Kids got guitars and formed bands – local record labels took the bands and cut records, new pedals and guitar styles developed – the media (radio, TV, the ‘yoof’ market) grabbed hold of what was happening, that now sound. And there you have it: soon enough, the United States of America was a teeming nation of garage heads, longhairs running around the weekends having a gas and playing hip, sneering guitar music with lots of attichood. Garage became the sound of Saturday nights on the strip, house parties and ‘yoof’ revolt.
However, garage really became garage when the collective tongue of American youth first tasted acid. It produced the Eastern-sounding guitar solos, flanged production and weirded-out style that developed into acid-rock-psychedelia. Garage and acid were all too often synonymous because they both reflected the grass-roots teen experience in mid- to late 1960s America. So before the truly psychedelic soundtrack of the Woodstock era (The Dead, Jefferson Airplane, that whole Haight-Ashbury scene), it was garage the hallucinogenic menace, all colour fuzz and hysterical freak-outs.
Garage isn’t the grand soundtrack of a generation, in the way ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ fits nicely over a montage of 35mm shots of Berkeley student protests on television. However, it is the unsung sound of 1960s teen culture between the heyday of the civil rights movement and when everything went a little west. A 1980s punk-inflected garage revival has renewed interest, sending record companies and collectors back into the vaults. As a result there are a vast plethora of garage compilations now available, all with screwy-as-hell names – Mind Blowers, Mind Rockers, Rare 60s Garage from the Primordial Depths! But start with Nuggets; it combines the hits with the rarer stuff.
Tom Rollins organises a garage/psych/soul/Mod night at Kambar, which is next on Thursday, 11 Feb. More info here.
Topics: Genre Theory, Music
