Yep, you guessed it. Time for 60’s garage-rock/protopunk from American G.I.’s who were stationed in Germany and shaved tonsures onto their heads and wore nooses around their necks.
Wait, what?
It’s the Monks.
And this is some choice footage.
It’s quite simple, really.
Post header image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
Glyph
Glyph is worse than some and better than others. He believes that life is just one damned thing after another, that only pop music can save us now, and that mercy is the mark of a great man (but he's just all right). Nothing he writes here should be taken as an indication that he knows anything about anything.
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Obviously, one of Mark E. Smith’s favourite bands.Report
Heh. Come back next week, I’m doing the Fall then!
One thing I don’t understand about the Monks – they were still active duty when they started the band, right? So is a tonsure within regulations (as long as the hair is short, can it be styled however?)Report
the tonsures came after discharge, iirc.
heh, discharge.
but yeah a world in which the monks were the beatles and the beatles were not the beatles would have been a better world.Report
Love the Monks. Those guys didn’t give a shit long before not giving a shit was cool.Report
I can’t believe how much great old footage is on YouTube. I find all kinds of stuff that I just assumed there was no video of (and sometimes it’s like this, footage from German or Spanish etc. TV).Report
I’ve been annoying my cats all morning every time the female announcer appears with her microphone—Frank Zappa voice: “It’s shaped like a Telefunken U47.”
It’s great to see these clips again. I remember a few years ago seeing them whapping away at the guitar on the floor and thinking, why the hell was I not informed about this??Report
How strange.
I looked them up on wiki and they should be in their 20s in the videos according the info there but they look like a bunch of suburban dads in their 30s and 40s. There is something about the 1960s that makes people look older than they really were.Report
Well, they are wearing “ties”, and shaving “bald spots” onto their heads probably didn’t help.Report
@glyph
I wonder when the exact break was from needing to wear suits and ties to rock being performed in jeans and t-shirts and stuff that was costume like and not suits and ties (think what Roger Daltry wore to sing My Generation on Smothers Brothers). Probably 1965 or so? Maybe 66 or 67?Report
I don’t think they look old, but then again, I’m a youthful-looking 78 years old. Mid-twenties was solidly adult until fairly recently in the U.S. and still is in most of the rest of the world.Report
Further to that, my father was stationed in Heidelberg, defending Germany from the Viet Cong, with a wife and son (me) living off base in 1969, when he was 23. He never experienced the extended teenagerhood that I sure as hell lived.
Wow, for a moment there, I thought I may have actually been in the vicinity at the time these shows were taped, but sadly it looks like the Monks were no more by 1967.Report
@krogerfoot
I think you might have typed the age wrong in your first post 🙂Report
I have a deep love for 60s garage rock. I dunno if the world would be a better place if The Monks were The Beatles, but it’d almost certainly be a better place if The Monks and The Beatles got equal time.Report
The thing about ’60’s garage rock is there’s just…so…MUCH of it out there. I was toying with the idea of doing a post on it at one point – and I’m someone who has only dipped his toes into that arena – but the sheer volume of stuff that exists is crazy to me. It would end up being a yearlong series.
And yeah, a lot of it sounds similar, but it’s all mostly still pretty good.
I know that there are beaucoup obscure and forgotten records in any genre, but that period/genre just seems SO fertile – by my highly-scientific estimate, there are approximately eleventy-kabillion ’60’s garage LP’s and singles.
Maybe it was a combo of the goldrush to try to find (or be) the next Beatles or Stones, plus rock hadn’t yet fully splintered into various subgenres like metal, psych, etc., so many people were trying to plow a similar furrow?Report
I am really sorry to tell you this, but this is The Monk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9udeWOjjls
I absolutely love this clip. That dancing he’s doing in the opening? I do that. When music takes over me, I cannot do anything else. I stand, and let it flow through me, move to it, and gravity goes away. I’m careful listening to music driving; sometimes I have to pull over.
And a side note, because of this movie, I forgive Clint Eastwood his politics, whatever they may be. I’m not yet convinced they’re not performance art.
(And that’s a very long clip, a full-length movie, but please, watch it when you can. It will awaken you to crepuscule.)Report
It’s a jungle out there.Report