In the G’rage (Part Duh)

When I first started getting into music, my friends and I had one of our first jam sessions in the sweltering heat of my parents’ garage. If I remember correctly, it started out with my mangling a rough rip off of Weezer’s 2001 hit “Hash Pipe,” while my friends Greg and Ben joined in with trashy drums and a screaming anti-lead guitar line. Ah, those were the days…

We’d later form a (slightly) more proficient ensemble in our last couple of years of high school, but in those formative years, the garage was our home. It was barren, metallic and almost entirely unsympathetic to any kind of creative work, but it was a place where we could lay into our instruments with an embarrassing level of earnestness and make a god-awful noise that was completely ours. Greg’s garage had hanging carpets rigged up to give the effect of a soundproofed studio, and deep inside this shag rug womb we would blast-off on double-tempo renditions of Nirvana, Green Day, and occasionally some classic rock like Zeppelin and the Eagles. I would hang an old karaoke mic from the ceiling and scream myself hoarse over songs like “In Bloom,” “Church on Sunday,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” When we finally opened the big clanging door we were a reasonable high school band.

When I got a little older I started getting into the history of garage rock and started to re-listen to British Invasion bands like the Kinks, the Stones, the Beatles, the Zombies, and the Who. While these groups obviously exhibited a certain amount of polish and a knack for finely crafted melodies, it was the un-tutored, raw knuckleheaded-ness of stuff like “All Day and All of the Night” and “Get Off My Cloud” that really grabbed me by the guts as a teenager. Reading about garage rock more recently, I was reminded of a host of other groups I had heard on oldies radio as a kid that had championed that crude garage sound, such as The Troggs, ? and the Mysterians, the Kingsmen, and Steppenwolf. All of these groups had great pop hits that could be played with minimal technical ability and only required that the performer bring to the song a raucous enthusiasm and complete disregard for cool-handed composure. The kind of anti-elitist ethos that these brilliant songs represented really helped push me along to write my own tunes and start playing in front of people.

The Trashmen were a great garage rock group from days gone by. Here’s a very appropriate video for their hit “Surfin’ Bird.”