How did you get into garage records? Were YOU in a band? Are you still in a band?

[BBTD]

I got interested in pop music in the mid-70's through my older brother and through my comrades at school....Queen, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad.

In the late 70's I was into punk. I was 15 years old then. My favourite bands were The Buzzcocks, The Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. Few punk records were available in my little hometown. We frequently visited Amsterdam & Rotterdam for vinyl shopping. I lost interest in punk when it degenerated into Oi! and hardcore. I never liked bands such as The Exploited and G.B.H. The Dead Kennedys' "Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables" was i.m.o. the last great in-your-face punk album.

Garage music sneeked in by chance in the early 80's. Some obscure albums with the word "PUNK!" on the cover found their way from the import boxes of RAF Records (Amsterdam) to my home. These turned out to be "Ear Piercing Punk" and "Boulders Vol. 1". My fascination with 60's garage really took off in 1984 after a 30-page "Mau Mau - Garage" special in Dutch pop magazine OOR. That's where I first heard about obscure U.S. 60's bands as The Drones, The Rovin' Flames, The Third Bardo etc. From that point collecting original 45's became serious. Dutch Nederbeat 45's were quite easy to find these days. Spare copies were traded with likeminded record maniacs from around the globe. My first BEAT BEHIND THE DYKES record list was sent out in 1986.

In 1988 I was the singer in a short-time local band called The Vejtables. Initially called The Vegetables (named after the singing rotten vegetables in the fridge in the early 80's comedy series THE YOUNG ONES) we adopted the name of the San Francisco 60's group. The idea was to dress up like vegetables on stage. The drummer had an orange carrot suit. I was supposed to dress up like a cucumber or so, but I never did. We were a very inconsistent band, a bunch of jokers, but hey...we did cover versions of The Softs' "Paarse Broek", Outsiders "Touch" and C+B "Your Body Not Your Soul"....not that bad, huh?

In 1992 BEAT BEHIND THE DYKES turned into a professional ran mail order company and also started selling 45's by new garage bands. Lists were send out with a regular 3-4 times a year schedule. The 1990's were the high-days of the printed record list. I also started selling punkrock, mod and powerpop 45's from the 70's and 80's. In the last 10-15 years most of the selling is through the internet (my own website, eBay).

In the last couple of years I started to make music myself again. I live in Holland's hinterland, it's quite difficult here to find the right like-minded people to do anything together. I prefer to do jangly folk rock/garage-type stuff. Still hope to have a band together before I turn 50, ha ha!

Here's a few pics of my current gear: Eko 290 Barracuda guitar (1965), Crucianelli Elite bass (1966), Ace Tone Top-5 organ. I also have "modern" Danelectro 6 & 12-str. guitars.

Erik/BBTD

 

[sircyclops]

As a kid my fave bands were the Yardbirds and novelty records (Dr. Demento, Weird Al, etc.). Got into punk and hardcore in high school (mid 90s) then I got my mind blown by The Mummies and veered into 90's "trash" (Supercharger, Phantom Surfers, Trashwomen), and ultimately worked my way into the CRAMPS and 60s garage, vintage rock n roll, and so on.
College days and things got a bit more psychedelicized, but these days I'm mostly down to earth, picking up whatever comps I can afford in the 60s punk vein.
Played in a band named after my fave Cramps song back in high school, and kept at it some in college. These days by way of "expressing myself" I dj once in awhile on a weekly garage show at a local college radio station.

sircyclops

 

[HarvestmanMan]

It all started with a Varese Sarabande comp called "Garage Rock Classics", which I bought around 2008...

Most stuff was garden-variety common tracks, but a few, like the Litter's "Action Woman", took me by surprise. I found two New Lime 45s in a thrift shop later that summer...and it was all downhill from there.

 

[Ryan L.]

In high-school I had a friend who was pretty dialed in to out-there sounds. He hipped me to a local garage/psych band called The 14th Wray. I really dug their cassette and played it to death. I'd heard whispers about Pebbles and when I found some used copies in the local head shop I snapped up a few. I'm pretty sure they were Vol. 5 and The Best Of Pebbles Vol. 2 (worst cover in the history of recorded music, but the music on that hideous pink vinyl still gives me goosebumps). I was totally transfixed by those records, and it didn't take me long to make another trip back to buy a few more volumes. I spent hours poring over the liner notes, trying to imagine what these bands looked like as I listened. It seemed like some of the songs came from another planet (it probably helped that some of the transfers were sped up, making nasal pubescent voices sound even more improbable), but I instantly felt a deep personal connection to this kind of music. It was so much fun to discover and to ponder over it. Who were these mysterious bands who made such captivating sounds? What happened to them? And why didn't more people know about this pinnacle of human achievement?!?!

I was also fortunate enough to have had access to a good 'zine that was published locally called Cryptic Tymes. That fed my appetite for more info and pictures of garage bands, and even though a lot of the coverage was of the '80s/'90s revival scene, it still helped to catalyze the aesthetic that has influenced me ever since.