0 Eric Burdon & the Animals, "See See Rider" (1966)

Oct. 1, 1966, #10
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Eric Burdon & the Animals had to go to the back of a long line in terms of getting their bite at this song, written by Ma Rainey in 1924 and recorded over the decades by LaVern Baker, Wee Bea Booze, Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, Lead Belly, Peggy Lee, Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Sonny Til & the Orioles, and Chuck Willis (who had a #12 pop hit with it in 1957 as "C.C. Rider"). It is so old it has sprouted a garden of alternative titles: "See See Rider Blues," "Easy Rider," "C.C. Rider." The theme is old too: look out for the faithless sexual wanton woman, aka "easy rider," 'cos she's wrecking marriages. Everything else is a play on that—the "C.C.," for example, is said to stand for "country circuit" preachers, who carried the good word and that old time religion on horseback from town to town. Nevertheless, not understanding any of that, I liked the Animals version so much that for many years I kept reflexively including it on short lists of my favorite songs, remembering the giddy heights it sent me to whenever it came leaping out of the radio, too infrequently. I love the surging, high-stepping thrust of it, the headlong tempo, the ballsy confidence. The band is in great form. The Animals were initially my favorite of the British Invasion bands of the time (after the Beatles, always after the Beatles). "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" was my first exposure, but it wasn't long before I caught up with the shivery-good "House of the Rising Sun" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." "See See Rider" is a strong point in a strong run, which also included "It's My Life," "Don't Bring Me Down," "When I Was Young," and I stuck around even for the San Francisco-addled period, which I still enjoy too, and beyond.

Detail: Eric Burdon & the Animals, "See See Rider" (1966)

0 Byrds, "Eight Miles High" (1966)

April 30, 1966, #14
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Wikipedia can just be priceless, as in this wonderful sentence: "Although commercial airliners fly at an altitude of six to seven miles, it was felt that 'eight miles high' sounded more poetic than six and also recalled the title of the Beatles' song 'Eight Days a Week.'" Because right, the song, credited jointly to Gene Clark, David Crosby, and Roger McGuinn, is about airplane rides. But that's not fair—already the article had talked about the strong and obvious drug connotations that the song bears. Me, I find the Byrds something of a blind spot in my own canon, part of a discernible pattern when you note the Everly Brothers and R.E.M. are two more. I have always respected the Byrds, had many friends gaga about them in various ways, and I understand the excitement on some levels. Yet for the most part I remain unmoved by the reality of hearing the music, except for random exceptions such as Sweetheart of the Rodeo and this strange plant that somehow took root in the top 40. I remember it freaked me out a little to hear it on the radio, that's part of its enduring appeal, especially late at night on scratchy AM radio stations. It comes sounding a little scratchy itself—prickly and rumbling, thudding, physical and awkward yet somehow insubstantial too, like cotton candy. Nothing else I'd heard felt remotely like it. Not so different from being high on hallucinogens in a way—and not so different from airplane rides either, for that matter. Wikipedia also identifies a source for this song that had never occurred to me before: John Coltrane. Oh yeah, that works—and the Byrds (which Elvis Presley would sardonically pronounce as "beards" two years later) had a hit with it. God bless them.

Detail: Byrds, "Eight Miles High" (1966)

0 Beach Boys, "God Only Knows" (1966)

Sept. 17, 1966, #39 
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Leave it to Brian Wilson to turn a figure of speech into a prayer and back again in the conventional space of some 2:54. We are listening to the hosannas still, and I come to deliver another. "God Only Knows" was the b-side to the top 10 hit "Wouldn't it Be Nice" and somehow, from that position, managed to crawl into the top 40 on its own, reaching #39 (I guess jukebox play or something had to be a factor). The various accolades are quite colossal at this time: Paul McCartney's favorite song of all time, #25 on a Rolling Stone list (500 Greatest Songs of All Time), and perhaps most unbelievably #1 on a Pitchfork list (Greatest Songs of the 1960s). I like "God Only Knows" because I like the sound of everything that came of the Pet Sounds sessions: the brilliant harmonies, and the songs, inflected equally with rock 'n' roll and European pop song, earnest entreaties to a heartless universe, a touching faith and its incipient erosion. Here it is plain as can be in the shrewd choice of phrase to lean on, so plaintive and heartfelt in the stained-glass cathedrals of the harmonies: "God only knows ... God only knows ... God only knows." What I'd be without you, to complete the thought. But the real energy here, always, is more on the order of agape—even as it is not entirely clear that it's not the girl herself who might be God. In which case, that's creepy. But of a piece with the sense we have of Brian Wilson's complexes, which include among other things a certain compulsive need to worship. He breaks that off pretty clean here, and produces a song that is endlessly beautiful, not to say exalted.

Detail: Beach Boys, "God Only Knows" (1966)

0 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Italy / Spain / West Germany, 161 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Mickey Knox
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editors: Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Antonio Casas

Eli Wallach's teeth are too good—and that goes for Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef too. Gleaming white and straight and lined up just the way modern-day dentists like them. At some point—I think usually around the time Tuco (aka "the Ugly," Wallach) has brought Blondie (aka "the Good," Eastwood) to a monastery to recover from a bad time in the desert—I notice how well tended those teeth are and I am taken temporarily out of the action. My last complaint. That's the niggling level of my criticism about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is otherwise practically flawless.

It is, as the mystifying phrase we like to use now has it, what it is, and makes no bones about it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a cartoon-level Western trafficking in existentialism, with extra fine shooting and a bone-simple story of revenge and greed animating the three principals, as the divertissement, cutting across history and causing it to fall away: the Civil War, the railroads, horses and guns and broad brim hats and brown liquor downed straight. All the familiar elements are here, but merely to serve as feeble context for these three gods striding through and defining the action, straight out of a deck of tarot cards—the two angels of heaven and hell, and the trickster fool with the sad, sad story.



Director and co-writer Sergio Leone worked out a style as dependent on visuals and music as on narrative and words. Not a word is heard in the first 10 minutes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and indeed the first 30 are dedicated to elaborate, stylized introductions, each with a freeze frame emblazoned with the key signifier: "the Ugly," "the Good," "the Bad." He liked it so much, and it works so well, that he repeated it again at the end.

Leone takes his sweet time over and over again setting up the many epic confrontations that populate this movie. We see one person doing something, and then another person doing something else, and then yet another person wandering away from the scene, and eventually all things connect up. But it takes a long time getting there—the picture is nearly three hours. As explosive and quick as the climaxes are we finally start to realize it's not the point at all. They are repetitive and redundant, an unending random game of rock-paper-scissors. What matters, in true existential fashion, is the beauty of each moment and the ability to grasp and see each one as it goes by. That's why it's slow.

There is a cinematic line that passes through Lawrence of Arabia and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and on to Apocalypse Now and John Woo's Red Cliff, great sprawling epics plunged into history and unfamiliar landscape—unfamiliar to its characters, its makers, its audience. Leone's work has been labeled "spaghetti western" from the first because he is Italian and brings a penetrating sense of foreignness to these quintessentially American scenes. The classic high-noon drawdown on main street here for example has the additional element of being in a war zone, with shelling. The story takes place in the middle of the Civil War, often intersecting directly with it. At one point Blondie and Tuco become prisoners of war in a Union POW camp where Angel Eyes (aka "the Bad," Van Cleef) has somehow become a commanding officer.

There is also something very funny (funny ha ha, I mean) about the way the plot points line up. Blondie is "Good" only in the sense of being skilled, but he is also a blessed figure in a way, often escaping harm altogether where Tuco suffers enormously. Blondie is absurdly able to operate serendipitously, at one point for example finding a cannon ready to fire and aimed just where he needs it. All he has to do is drop his arm and rest the coal of his familiar cheroot on the fuse. There is a sense of a greater power behind him, as there also is with Angel Eyes, in whose case the source is obviously infernal. By process of elimination that leaves Blondie as "Good." All things balance.

In a year when European art film was reaching certain enduring high points Leone was relegated more to the back and side of that, though we see better now that he certainly belongs with Bergman, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and the others. But spawning an international superstar in Clint Eastwood, playing with fundamental American b-movie elements, and incidentally seeing a good deal of commercial success obscured that somewhat, at least until Quentin Tarantino came along a few decades later (since which the problem tends to run in the other direction).

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a movie I return to frequently, not least because so many are willing to agree on it (as they never would for, say, Andrei Rublev), and it works even in fragments, which I know from running across it on TV. It's slow, but always engrossing—there is a fascinating intricacy to the parts, and there is something pleasingly geometric about the forces balanced against one another and how they play out. The end is represented by the lines of a triangle inside a circle. It has the capacity to surprise very much; I can still never quite get over the scene with the POW orchestra, haunted by "More feeling," one of the cruel guards barks at them at one point. It's funny and harrowing and unnerving as hell, and sweet and beautiful and haunting as well. The whole movie balances on the edge of a blade, for nearly three hours, and then pirouettes to an astonishing finale. It never gets old or stale.

Top 10 of 1966
1. Au hasard Balthazar
2. Persona
3. Andrei Rublev
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
5. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
6. Masculin feminin
7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
8. Seconds
9. The Battle of Algiers
10. Blow-Up

Detail: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

0 Cream, "I'm So Glad" (1966)

(listen)

I don't hear much about Cream these days. Maybe I'm traveling in the wrong circles. As a key prototype for the super-session super-group at least, it seems they might come up more often. Maybe people want to forget that. Not to mention authors of "White Room" and some other nice '60s moods. Not to mention "Eric Clapton is God"—that idea came and went fast. "I'm So Glad" is from the debut album Fresh Cream, which I got to almost last. It's a good tuneful album, before they started stretching out and making rote long live tracks a big part of the albums. The "Cream" trio had a big reputation to live up to, after all, but I'm more indifferent to the playing now, as the nine-minute live version of "I'm So Glad" from Goodbye quickly reminded me (and yes, it also makes me mostly indifferent to Cream too). What I like most about "I'm So Glad" are things like Jack Bruce's vocal, which was always a little underrated, the long-face, ringing harmonies they reach in the climax, with all the rest dropping out, and the loopy way they play off the lyric. Written and recorded originally by Skip James in 1931, Cream treats the song less as a blues and more as a music hall entertainment, with little instrumental gestures and flourishes. Bruce's carnival barking of the title, the basic lyric, does indeed sound glad in its monotonous way but also mocking, turning the song in a funny direction. I always think of it as a short pop song, but it is nearly four minutes, stretched out by the break and a typically lyrical guitar solo taken by Eric Clapton midway, which routes it back into the Cream mainline momentarily. Something for everyone.

Detail: Cream, "I'm So Glad" (1966)

0 Pet Sounds (1966)

(Previous shenanigans and assays here and here.)

Over the years I have come to think of this more as some obscure object of cult adoration, maybe on the order of Forever Changes or Secret Life of Harpers Bizarre or Five Leaves Left, a secret I share with maybe only a few thousand others on the planet. A delusion, in any case (and with all of them), but why do I think this? Fallout from the Smile debacle, maybe a little, which legend of course claimed as their Sgt. Pepper (which would then make this their Revolver, yes? So what's the problem?). Pet Sounds did spawn four top 40 hits, remember (counting the Brian Wilson solo, "Caroline, No"), two of them top 10s. But I don't know—I still have the impression that this familiar pantheon selection has been marginalized some, maybe more than it deserves. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell. It's an odd one, no denying that.



For one thing, it's never exactly rock 'n' roll, although it kicks off on an exuberant high note that nearly approximates it, "Wouldn't it Be Nice," one of the great singles of the '60s. But no, particularly in the context that follows, it's not too much rock 'n' roll at all, closer to oh, erm, "sparkling pop lounge," let's say, for lack of a better term, with the various lavish orchestral and other touches of audio texturing. Its bicycle horns and bells, harpsichords, theremins, wood blocks, lonesome trains flying down the track, and barking dogs, not to mention, always, those glorious and infinitely calculated harmonies, put it very much in the realm of a studio fantasy-scape.

But it's also so deeply personal. There was always some bent toward this with the Beach Boys. Even as hit-making factory capable of "Fun, Fun, Fun" and "Be True to Your School," they delivered up songs like "In My Room" and "Don't Worry Baby," great upwellings of an isolated (not to say utterly insulated) soul, haunting, vulnerable, poignant statements. That was matched with a flair for melody and arrangement that only appeared to be getting better. Chief songwriter and producer and head introvert Brian Wilson was increasingly where the gold lay, both creatively and commercially, even when he retired from touring in 1964—especially then. Pet Sounds stands in at a certain sustained peak of the period, not necessarily perfect of itself, but with handfuls of perfect moments enough to make it an album I return to often and think of very fondly. It stays stuck in players for weeks or more at a time, and that seems to happen every few years.

Now, just speculating, one reason I might find myself immune to the hysteria and mythologizing about the missing Smile is that I actually came to Pet Sounds late, in the early '80s, plucked out of a cutout bin (and incidentally perhaps the reason I think of it as obscure now). As a kid I loved all those tremendous mid-'60s hits, because how could you not—"California Girls," "Good Vibrations," "Heroes and Villains," and "Wouldn't it Be Nice" and "Sloop John B" from this album (I was even nuts for "Barbara Ann," but that’s more genuinely a kiddy song).

But next thing I noticed practically they were on the oldies circuit, and I never gave much more thought to them for a long time than I did to, say, the Supremes after their great period of radio hits. With Pet Sounds, 15 years late, I appreciated how the big hits bookended the first side nicely, but it was the poignant songs around them that impressed: "God Only Knows" (the last charting song from the album, which peaked at #39), "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," "That's Not Me," "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," "I Know There's an Answer." The titles themselves practically tell the story: it's one person's whole world, a big, frightening, wonderful place, where cares and worries fall away and love is as simple as putting a head on a shoulder. A fantasy land, on one level—yet there is always puling anxiety, a pained awareness of cares and worries too.

It's altogether beautiful. Each individual song, including the instrumentals which may or may not veer close to cheese, stands on its own and blends with the others in a tapestry of mood and yearning, a fantasy that hurts a little even as it is so sweet. Of course, there is a wonderful tension between how personal the songs are and how public the execution, that is, how dependent on so many people. Even the lead vocals, often a blend of many voices and close harmonies. "Sloop John B," for example, just to make a little note of the instrumentation on one track, which is emblematic of the whole album, includes: drums, tambourine, string bass, electric bass, guitars (3), organ, glockenspiel, clarinet, flute, and baritone saxophone. It's another part of the cognitive dissonance that makes the whole thing work for me—charm, mystery, sophistication, innocence, wonder. It's all here.

About those two instrumentals: one per side, nestled up close to the finales, "Let's Go Away for Awhile" and the title song are perhaps the most eloquent statements on the album about what it is and does, and especially, how it feels. It's strictly coolsville where they are, one part Parisian cosmopolite, one part carefree swinging California sunshine. Elements such as the dramatic and emphatic tympani in "Let's Go Away for Awhile" (another great song title in an album full of them) undercut the cool with a certain urgency that reminds again how much this is an album essentially by one person, and an eccentric person at that. But the rich surfaces created are vastly beguiling in service of him.

On two key songs the talk is more explicitly about what he is and is not, served up as a kind of feeling-through negative space ("not this," "wasn't that"). Now there is no band, save more or less as hired assistants, driven by the single vision and voice of Brian Wilson: "That's Not Me" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" are remarkably evocative, starting (again) with the simple sentiments of the titles. "That's Not Me" spells out the basic context early, in many ways the context for the whole album, which is the anxiety of failure: "I once had a dream / So I packed up and split for the city / I soon found out that my lonely life wasn't so pretty." What's not him, even according to his parents in a letter to the city, is leaving his girl to make it on his own—independence. Then the fantasy life quickly enters as well: "What matters to me is what I could be to just one girl," softly sounding the wistful all-grown-up note of "Wouldn't it Be Nice": "I'm glad I went now, I'm that much more sure that we're ready."

"I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (sometimes I speculate the Pet Shop Boys borrowed their own song-naming strategies wholesale from this album) is forthright about its intentions at every level. Arriving at the peak of British Invasion 2 guitars bass drum garage-rock aesthetics, it plods at soporific tempos, fitted out with clip-clop wooden blocks, a theremin, those emphatic tympani again, and occasional vaporous swirling eddies of harmonies, but mostly led by the reedy vocal of Brian Wilson. It's shrewd, canny songwriting. A person not feeling part of these times, after all—any person, any times—is probably more universal than otherwise, so the sentiment tugs here, and the warm whirlpool of emotion it offers seems a welcome place to pitch forward into.

Indeed, the whole album works much on those levels for me. But there is also something special in terms of good old sentimental wallowing in "Sloop John B," a #3 hit in the spring of 1966, which amazingly still has potential to bring back feelings and sensations from that time. So I can't help but love it for that, of course. The turn to sailing is a little surprising, one more outdoors California activity like surfing and cars, I suppose—but not really like them. If anything it's more symptom of Brian Wilson's fantasy mindset. It is actually a West Indies folk song that appeared on a 1927 collection put together by Carl Sandburg, and the sailing is more of the high-seas than recreational variety. Versions of it had previously been recorded by the Weavers, Kingston Trio, Johnny Cash, the pop singer Jimmie Rodgers, and Dick Dale. But you would never know it—I never did myself until practically just now. The arrangement by Brian Wilson and Al Jardine (and the fact they got the real hit out of it) has effectively made it the property of the Beach Boys since. In fact, many put it on the short lists of their best. I would guess that can be accounted for by how hard it leans into the phrase "I wanna go home," which is made to order for Brian Wilson, this album, and the Beach Boys' world view at large.

Last, and the opposite of least, it comes to a tremendous head on "Caroline, No," the last song and one of their greatest, overbrimming with tender feelings. It was released as a Brian Wilson solo a couple months ahead of the album and made it to #32. The fact that it fits so neatly with the rest of the album is just more evidence I think of what a personal project the whole thing is. It was written originally by Wilson as "Carol, I Know," with a high school crush in mind, but in the playback co-writer Tony Asher and all agreed "Caroline, No," which it already sounded like, fit the mood better. And it does—one of the finest uses of a comma in a song title I know. It feels like what it feels like to lose something you never had, which could well be the bitterest-sweetest loss of all. Weighed down by emotion as much as the album opener "Wouldn't it Be Nice" is buoyed by it, it drifts toward an opium haze despair that is nearly pleasure itself, and starkly romantic. That briefest pause signaled by the comma contains all the anguish, casting it back again into realms of fantasy. "Where is the girl I used to know? How could you lose that happy glow?" On the other hand, perhaps something really happened: "It's so sad to watch a sweet thing die." Like the rest of the album, it is ultimately a mystery, residing in the interiors of Brian Wilson's head. Those with inspiration to treat this as a headphones album know well the wisdom of ending it on a lonesome train and dogs barking. Pet sounds. It's nighttime there. The petting zoo has closed.

Detail: Pet Sounds (1966)

0 Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

France/Sweden, 95 minutes
Director/writer: Robert Bresson
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Jean Wiener, Franz Schubert
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Balthazar, Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green, François Lafarge, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Philippe Asselin, Pierre Klossowski, Nathalie Joyaut

I have a great fondness for Robert Bresson's donkey movie, which is typically enough fractured, allusive, and blunt, helped in great measure by a basic narrative element barely in Bresson's control, if it is in his control at all. Back in film appreciation classes, I was given to understand that the somewhat stultifying Diary of a Country Priest was Bresson's essential go-to masterpiece so it's interesting to me that Balthazar is now ranked highest among the canonizers at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, followed by Pickpocket (my other favorite Bresson), A Man Escaped, Mouchette, L'Argent, and then finally Country Priest at #196. Despite that apparent fall in favor by Country Priest, a total of six titles in that list's top 200 clearly signals a regard for Bresson that may be higher than ever.

The element barely under control, of course, is Balthazar, who is an enigma in the way of all animals we may come to know, a blank slate as such, one that as viewers (and/or caretakers) we may be quick to fill in. Bresson artfully matches his usual bent for ambiguity—as always, the intent appears to be to film the ineffable—with the manifest reality of the donkey, which I think is what makes this movie work so well. However abstracted anything around it might seem to become, it remains the story of a life from beginning to end, "Balthazar, told by random incident" (more or less the translation of the title).



Balthazar is enigmatic in other ways too. He appears to have no other name than the one he bore in the picture. He is not listed in the credits anywhere I can find (there are probably two of him anyway as he appears first as an adorable foal). In fact, there doesn't appear to be a lot of information about him. IMDb has an intriguing story about how the animal was not even trained when it was acquired for the film, and little was done to remedy that other than teaching him the trick he does in a circus scene. He is thus almost pure cipher, harried for probably weeks or more by the bewildering confusion of a camera crew. I can imagine an interesting Les Blank coulda woulda shoulda documentary to accompany this that would tell the real story of the real animal.

Full disclosure: I come at the picture from a certain point of view I am likely to project all over it. In fact, with this particular movie, projection tends to be even a little more evident than usual. It produces copious amounts of weeping in otherwise stone-faced men and women, and leaves the most passionate vaguely bored. It is simply a puzzle, and a bit of a pretentious one, to many others. I find myself alert to the treatment of the donkey, somehow acutely aware it never has any idea of being in a movie. There is one scene that seriously threatens to break the spell, when the film itself becomes as despicable as the thuggish character it is attempting to show. Yet on balance I was moved deeply by the life story told here, appreciating the natural power of the scenes, as conceived, and by their sequencing and setups and occasional explosions.

Though Balthazar begins the movie, and life, as the pet for children on a country farm, it is not long before his life as a beast of burden sets in. Less than 10 minutes along a title card briskly informs us, "YEARS GO BY." At which point all the narrative threads begin to distinguish themselves: the farm girl who loves Balthazar, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky, who is tenderly beautiful and a magnet for the camera), the juvenile delinquent, Jacques (Walter Green, wearing a black leather jacket in every scene), and the older generation of family and neighbors who ineptly (and sometimes a little inappropriately) attempt to meet their responsibilities and care for them.

It is filled with many human cruelties. One could complain that some are a bit elaborately fashionable (Marie's humiliation by Jacques in her home, late in the movie), but they nonetheless hit with force. One could also complain it assumes the gait of an allegory too easily. There's a certain specificity to Jacques's relationship with Marie and his life around the town, for example, but otherwise the black leather jacket and, later, a ubiquitous transistor radio playing obnoxious "rock 'n' roll" feel like rote symbolism. But this is a very spry film as assembled, moving rapidly about its characters and modes, perhaps stubbornly refusing to clarify its narrative points (perhaps not), but always going back again to its certainties.

Balthazar is ultimately the one certainty of this picture, even as he never quite fits into it any better than he does the lives of those around him. Bresson finds numerous ways to emphasize this over and over. Medium-close shots for a person, it turns out, produce extreme close-ups of a donkey. When Marie pets him and murmurs to him to comfort herself, we see her just fine in almost glamour shots but we see only one eye and the contours of part of Balthazar's head. But the eye does read as expressive, and his bulk fills the frame. He is imposing and omnipresent in this film, as intended.

At which point you either make your purchase or you don't, I suppose. So much depends on caring about the donkey—the counterpoint all through between braying (a disturbing noise when prolonged) and chilly Schubert, the lovely touches of sound effects, the humor (as in the titles pausing for a bray), and of course the final sequence. The last 10 or 15 minutes, with Jacques's last unforgivable act, and all the ways it plays out, is one of the great finishes to a movie. Au hasard Balthazar remains scrupulously within the bounds of what it sets for itself, and achieves a tremendously poignant note, simply by the nature of the shape and aspect of the animal we have become familiar with.

Detail: Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

0 Monks, "I Hate You" (1966)

(listen)

Wikipedia has the Monks down as "avant-garde garage" so I guess that settles that. The five American soldier nobodies who were stationed in Germany in the mid-'60s and who make up this band didn't just happen on to the way they sound, but put it together carefully. They poured everything into one album, Black Monk Time, and then waited 33 years and more for the rest of the world to even begin catching up. I think we're just about there now. The project does indeed fit the post-Beatles DIY "garage" aesthetic that inspired suburban youth across America in 1966 (in a post-Stones vein, more in line with the Chocolate Watchband and Standells). It often sounds like blueprint and instruction manual for the Velvet Underground and Stooges, not just ahead of its time but nearly out of it entirely, hovering above and gazing beatifically far, far into the future. They were probably using the term "shoegaze" even then, and laughing at the comparative feebleness. Few bands clobber one over the head quite so artfully as the Monks, with a bottom that feels like the extra Gs of a massive planet, flattening the features of the face into a mask and threatening to collapse bones into jelly. Yet for all that, it moves ("lumbers" obscures the precision) with energy, menace, and sardonic charm. It means you no harm but it means you no good either, just a small part of the moth/flame draw. I picked this for the title, which typically for the Monks clarifies everything and nothing ("Well you know my hate's everlastin', baby, yeah yeah! / But call me"). You can't go wrong with anything on the album at large.

Detail: Monks, "I Hate You" (1966)