So…… Sixties Garage Punk. The harder end of the ‘garage boom’ of the mid sixties – the (mainly) American kids who hit their parents’ garages, pushed the Buick out and set up whatever cheap instruments they could find, and earnestly bashed out whatever ‘British Invasion’ covers they could muster. The more proficient might score a teen dance, or a school assembly gig, even the heady heights of a vanity pressing of fifty copies of their very own 45!
The Garage Standards are well known – Electric Prunes, Standells, The always awesome Sonics, much of the stuff on the seminal Nuggets comp and later box set. That’s the bedrock for sure, but I highly recommends the lesser-known Pebbles and Rubble series of comps- the seriously great Back From The Grave series, the Love, Peace & Poetry comps, (with the American, African and Mexican psychedelia focused releases particularly great).
But that’s just the tip of the garage punk iceberg…. I mix in obscurities from comps with groovy titles like Slitherama Teen Trash From Psychedelic Tokyo 66-69 , Surfbeat Behind the Iron Curtain, Who Will Buy These Wonderful Evils – Swedish 60s and 70s Pop, Freakbeat, Psych, Garage and Prog Nuggets, Los Nuggetz -60s punk, pop and psychedelic from Latin America, Garage Psychedelic and Rock n Roll from the Un-natural State Arkansas, Persian Underground – Garage Rock, Beat and Psychedelic Sounds from The Iranian 60’s & 70’s Scene, Savage Sounds from South Africa – Rare 60s Beat Garage Growlers From Beyond the Cape of Good Hope, and that barely even covers the crate-digging excesses of the unreleased vinyl acetates, often with unidentified bands who we can only assume are the aforementioned teens in the suburbs of middle America.
Heady stuff. Crude stuff at times, but with an earthy charm that’s got me hooked.
Retrospect is a weekly radio show and podcast presented by Phil Grey, produced and first broadcast at FreeFM.
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