While solo artists and swinging groups ruled fifties rock
radio, bands took over in the sixties. All across America and elsewhere,
quartets of pimply kids gathered in basements and garages to bash out two or three
chords. This new home grown-rock movement was underway well before The Beatles
arrived.
Seth Bovey traces the origin of the garage band phenomenon
so crucial to the development of Rock & Roll in his new book Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock
from the 1950s to the Present. His approach is original, eschewing usual
suspects such as Chuck Berry and Elvis to argue that the grungy guitars of Link
Wray and Duanne Eddy—and factors such as the exposure TV gave such artists, a
new wave of cheap guitars imported from Japan, and the general DIY spirit of
mid-century America—set the stage for garage bands.
Bovey then traces the genre’s evolution starting with The
Fabulous Wailers before touching on everyone from The Kingsmen to Paul Revere
and the Raiders to The Sonics to Dick Dale to The Knickerbockers to The
Chocolate Watchband to The 13th Floor Elevators, while also looking
beyond the usual American boys to discuss all-female groups such as The
Pleasure Seekers and The What Four and international combos such as Los Bravos,
Q65, and The Spiders.
As his book’s subtitle indicates, Bovey also strides beyond
the garage band golden era of the sixties to see how the movement subsequently remained
active with the rise of garage-focused ’zines such as Who Put the Bomp, the Nuggets
and Pebbles comps, punk, the much
publicized garage revival of the early ’00s that gave us The White Stripes and
Strokes, and most importantly, the fact that contemporary bands such as The
Black Lips, Thee Oh Sees, and The Incredible Staggers are keeping the garage
lights on—though with very little influence in America, where Rock & Roll
is dead as Dillinger.
The only trouble with Bovey’s format is that garage rock is
a cornerstone of six decades of Rock & Roll, but his book is only 170-pages
long. So his storytelling is a bit too fleet footed, and the fact that he skims
over several of the quintessential garage bands—particularly Question Mark and
the Mysterians, The Seeds, and The Standells (who grace this book’s cover but
aren’t even mentioned in its pages!) means that Five Years Ahead of My Time can’t really be called “definitive.” Yet
because Bovey is more concerned with following the origins and evolution of
garage rock than name-checking important bands, his book remains a satisfying pocket
history of a crucial strain of Rock & Roll.
