Mary Mary - Los Ovnis

Sixties garage punks from Mexico play The Monkees. That sentence makes me way happier than it should. MARY MARY!

This will be the first of a few entries looking at underground sixties Mexican musicians, but to set the stage and get you shimmying in your seat with anticipation enjoy Mary Mary by Los Ovnis!

Shanghied - The Fabulous Wailers

Shanghied - The Fabulous Wailers (Spotify)

In the late fifties and early sixties proto-punk bands began to explode out of the Pacific North-West. The Fabulous Wailers (not those Wailers) were a garage rock band from Tacoma, Washington chiefly active from the late fiftes to sixties. They are widely hailed as one of the original garage bands, and are chiefly known for their song 'Tall Cool One.'

Today I have pulled out the instrumental number 'Shanghied.' The song opens with a drum hook almost stolen straight from 'Suzie-Q' before gently gliding into two minutes of smoke filled guitars and gurning sax.

Roll Over Beethoven - The Sonics

Before you even DARE hit play, turn your volume up to max. If you're not on a computer with big speakers put on headphones. NOW. It's illegal to listen to The Sonics without nearly blowing out your eardrums.

The Sonics are a band made of drums. Every sound has the crack, whoomp, bang of a snare hit so hard it explodes. Every drum strike is like your heart being suffocated by a bomb. Guitars aren't strummed, they're punched. The pianos sound like they're being smashed with hammers. With every scream ripping out of Gerry Roslie you can feel eyes bugging out of his head like a pair of pounding kick drums while he throws up a cascade of cymbals.

When not ripping apart cover songs to shreds, The Sonics were happy to sing about the sexual power of witches, recreational strychnine drinking, and slowly going psychopathic from love.

Proto-punk doesn't even begin to describe or do justice to the pure brute force of this sound. Every song they touch sounds like it has rabies.