Chapter 03 — Rhythms
Garage Rock
60s
In the mid-sixties, thousands of American teenagers saw the Beatles on television and reached a logical conclusion: we can do that too. Garage rock was exactly that: neighborhood bands rehearsing in the family garage, singles recorded in an afternoon, cheap fuzz and more attitude than technique. The Sonics screamed as if the microphone owed them money, and 'Louie Louie' became the accidental anthem of an entire nation. Our thesis is simple: garage is the most honest genre in this story, because it never aspired to posterity and that is exactly why it achieved it. Without these glorious amateurs there is no punk, no indie, no 2000s revival. The seed of everything was in that garage.
Key exponents
The Sonics
1960–1968
The wild men of Tacoma: their 1965 'Here Are The Sonics' is the rawest record of its decade.
The Kingsmen
1959–1968
They recorded 'Louie Louie' in one take for 50 dollars, and the FBI spent two years investigating the lyrics.
The Seeds
1965–1972
Sky Saxon and his 'Pushin' Too Hard': two chords out of Los Angeles that anticipated punk by a decade.
The Standells
1962–1970
'Dirty Water' gave Boston an eternal anthem and gave garage its neighborhood bad-boy attitude.
Keep rewinding
00s
garage
The White Stripes
The surname was the drummer's
They said they were brother and sister: Jack repeated it in interviews as "the two youngest of ten". In fact they had married on 21 September 1996 and divorced in March 2000, and when the press exposed it in 2001 they carried on insisting. And the surname was hers: Jack was born John Anthony Gillis and took Meg's when they married.
60s
garage
The Velvet Underground
Thirty thousand bands
Almost nobody bought them, and half the rock that followed came out of them. Brian Eno's line sums it up, even if the figure he quotes is not quite right.
00s
garage
The Strokes
A small amplifier
In 2001 they sounded revolutionary by sounding old. They recorded the vocals through a cheap practice amp on purpose, leaving the good gear unused.
70s
garage
The Guess Who
The Canadians who put an anti-United States song at number one in the United States
The riff was improvised one night in Ontario and exists only because somebody in the crowd had a home tape recorder. With that song, awkward for the country it pointed at, a band from Winnipeg reached the American summit before anyone else.
60s
garage
Shocking Blue
The Dutchmen who got there first
Four musicians from The Hague, three chords and a typo: the first American number one by a Dutch band was sung with a word that doesn't exist, over a folk melody already more than a century old.
60s
garage
What Is Garage Rock?
Garage rock did not exist while it was happening: nobody called it that at the time. What it is, where it came from, and why a 1972 compilation had to rescue it from oblivion before anyone realised punk had started there.
60s
garage
From the Garage to the Stadium
Every fifteen or twenty years rock grows too perfect and someone, from a basement, drags it back to the essentials. Punk, garage punk, grunge and the 2000s revival: the map of the returns, and why rock's humblest sound is the one it always comes home to.
60s
garage
Ten Garage Rock Bands You Have to Hear
Every garage rock list looks the same: the same four names and the same two songs. This one starts with the essentials and lingers on the ones you don't know — the Monks, the Count Five, the Knickerbockers and the rest of the nuggets buried deepest.
00s
garage
The Rebobinados Manifesto: Why Rewind
There has never been so much music available, and it has never been so easy to listen to nothing. Against the algorithm's forgetting, this blog proposes listening backwards to understand what plays today. Rock's living memory, decade by decade. And an invitation: write with us.
00s
garage
Garage Rock: The Eternal Return
The Strokes invented nothing and that's why they changed everything. From 'Nuggets' to 'Seven Nation Army': the 2000s revival proved that whenever rock gets too polished, someone rediscovers three chords in a garage.