Review: 'Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present'

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 13^th 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, how 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 since 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!), 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.

Review: 'Looking Stateside: 80 US R&B Mod, Soul and Garage Nuggets'

The Mod music scene was all about give and take. Mods took the records of American soul musicians who probably didn’t know or care what a Mod was and spun them incessantly at their pilled up, nattily attired shindigs. They gave back to the scene by forming their own bands and slamming out buzz-saw power pop that owed as much to The Animals and The Kinks as it did to Eddie Holland and Bob & Earl.

Being that Mod was a peculiarly British phenomenon, those self-identifying Mod bands tended to be British. However, in the wake of the British Invasion that stirred a rabid-Anglophile streak across America, there were Mod—or at least Moddish— bands Stateside too. Perhaps some of these bands really thought of themselves as Mods. Perhaps some of them have only been identified with the scene after the fact. I have a hunch that artists such as The Sonics, The Knickerbockers,  We the People (can a band adopt a more American name than that?), and certainly Gene Vincent didn’t think of themselves as Mods any more than Joe Tex or Curtis Knight did, but I’ll be damned if hearing all these U.S. soulsters and poppers bunched together on Looking Stateside: 80 US R&B Mod, Soul and Garage Nuggets doesn’t make me want to slip on my winkle-pickers and do the Block.

The name of the game here is obscurity, which pretty much has to be the case at this late stage in sixties-pop compilation history (and this one follows three others in RPM Records’ Looking… Mod-box series). However, there are familiar artists and songs. Versions of essential Mod anthems such as “Leaving Here”, “Shame, Shame, Shame”, and “Harlem Shuffle” are here, as are a quite a number of “original” songs that borrow liberally from familiar items such as “Get Ready”, “Do You Love Me”, “Satisfaction”, “Sugar Shack” (in an answer song by Georgia Lynn that slaughters Jimmy Gilmer’s original), “Night Train” (via a visceral instrumental penned by eighties TV jackass Morton Downey Jr., of all people), and once again, “Leaving Here”. There’s also Mickey Lee Jones’s original version of “Hey Sah-Lo Ney” (cut definitively by ace Mod combo the Action but not necessarily better), an outrageously powerful number called “He’s Mine” by The Swans, The Wailers’ eardrum-pulverizing “Out of Our Tree”, and a version of “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day” that predates The Monkees’ by a few months (but hardly betters it).

As a whole, Looking Stateside is a pretty damn consistent dance party in a clamshell box, though there may be a few too many instrumentals and it would have been an even more engaging listen if the soul and pop numbers had been mingled instead of segregated on their own discs. Still, it’s fab that bin dives can still turn up enough killer obscure records to basically fill three discs such as these.

Psychobabble’s 20 Greatest One and No Hit Wonders of 1965!

Psychobabble’s 20 Greatest One and No Hit Wonders of 1965!

Tomorrow is October 1st, and that means Monster Movie Month will be returning to Psychobabble, and that means the Rock & Roll half of this site’s Jekyll & Hyde personality is going on hiatus. In the final Rock post until November, we’ll be taking a nice, long look at twenty phenomenal singles by twenty phenomenal one and no hit wonders released 45 years ago. These artists either only managed a single placing in the Top Twenty of Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart or never managed to get in there at all. So turn up the volume as loud as it will go and get ready to go-go to Psychobabble’s 20 Greatest One and No Hit Wonders of 1965!



20. “What’cha Gonna Do Baby” by Jason Eddie & the Centremen

Sweeping down from the cosmos with a burst of sci-fi organ, “What’cha Gonna Do Baby” by Jason Eddy & the Centremen is instantly identifiable as the work of producer Joe Meek. Meek is sometimes referred to as “the English Phil Spector,” both for his distinctive production style and his legendary madness (Meek’s life ended in a murder/suicide). Unlike Spector, Meek rarely worked with singers of the caliber of Darlene Love or Tina Turner. That Jason Eddy’s voice isn’t the strongest instrument matters little, though, as Meek swathes his sub-Gene Pitney croon in a luxurious shroud of otherworldly textures, making this single by the hitless Eddy and his Centremen a truly dramatic experience.

19. “The Rebel Kind” by Dino, Desi, and Billy

Considering their hopelessly unhip credentials as the sons of Desi Arnaz and Rolling-Stones-disser Dean Martin, Desi Jr. and Dino Jr. (joined by Billy Hinsche) had no right to cut a record as groovy as “The Rebel Kind”. Penned by freaky cult crooner Lee Hazelwood, this fuzzed out hunk of garage bubblegum outclasses Dino, Desi, and Billy’s sole top-twenty hit, “I’m a Fool”. No one would ever mistake these dewy teens for rebels, but that might not stop them from fruging madly to “The Rebel Kind”.

18. “Lies” by The Knickerbockers