| Tinymixtapes |
 "Stop it, stop it, it’s too loud for my ears... Stop it I don’t like it," lead Monk Gary Burger sings over “Monk Time,” the opening cut off The Monks’ revolutionary record, 1966’s Black Monk Time. The band — Larry, Dave Eddie, Roger, and Gary — couldn’t have come equipped with a stranger back story: five American G.I.s stationed in Germany during the war, they formed a beat group, covering Chuck Berry and playing to scattered crowds. After being discharged, they stayed in Germany and, under the watchful eye of Walther Niemann and Karl-H.-Remy, two German existentialist impresarios, fashioned themselves into an off kilter, manic rock unit, morphing from their innocuous beginnings as a mild-mannered Five Torquays into the radical Monks: hair shaved into tonsures, black robes, noose around neck, and feedback blaring.
The music is scuzzy, violent, and explosive, the group reportedly aiming for “anti-Beatles” status, yet it’s difficult to imagine John Lennon not being green with jealousy at what The Monks accomplished with their incredibly brief career. And while the hippies back home sang honey drop “protest” music, The Monks employed a decidedly more radical approach to anti-war art: With bursts of bleating organ, fuzz bass, and guitars that traded chords for scratchy bits of white noise, The Monks’ sound couldn’t have been farther removed from all but the most marginalized American acts. The Monks’ secret weapon was Dave Day’s modified banjo, souped up with an electric pickup that defined the band’s sound, its percussive, tinny effect perfectly accentuating the prickly aesthetic. The music is so decidedly “future” it’s almost baffling. They quietly laid down the foundation for Krautrock’s grinding minimalism and punk’s aggressive sonics, while retaining an awkwardly soulful sensibility, mirroring the energy of Detroit garage rock with purely rhythmic shuffle....full text |
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| Boomkat |
| The Monks started life as five American GIs stationed in Germany, playing beat music together during downtime. After their discharge Gary Burger, Larry Clark, Dave Day, Eddie Shaw and Roger Johnston formed The Torquays, a band that only morphed into The Monks after a bit of conceptualising, stipulating that the group should become the "anti-Beatles", wearing robes and nooses around their necks (stealing the theatrical thunder from SunnO))) by forty years or so). Their imposing, dangerous image was only reinforced by their dark, propulsive sound, plating the seeds that would shape krautrock, proto-punk and psychedelic garage rock for years to come. This collection captures the build-up recordings to The Monks' epochal Black Monk TIme, presenting the band at their very rawest, when they were still very much an unfinished product. This edition comes with bonus tracks 'There She Walks' and a very different sounding take on 'Boys Are Boys'....full text |
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| The-monks |
| When the Monks first appeared in public - furiously bashing out songs like "I Hate You" and "Shut Up," cutting their hair into tonsures, making their instruments screech with feedback - the world was nowhere near ready for them. It was the mid-'60s in Germany, the Cold War was all that was on anyone's mind, and punk wasn't going to happen for another decade. On the German tour circuit, the Monks were billed as "stars from the U.S.A." - though they never had a record that charted, and never played outside of Europe. Thomas "Eddie" Shaw was their bass player, an ex-GI driven by a vague grasp of Ayn Rand and an unstoppable desire to be a rock star. Black Monk Time tells the band's story, from its origins as a GI cover band endlessly cranking out "Green Onions," through its constant stumbling onto genius (they basically did what they did to meet girls), to its break-up right before a proposed tour of Vietnam. What the book is most valuable for, though, is its look at the grueling life of a touring band then, when a group would take up a residency at a club for a month and play 8 hours a day, 7 days a week - the same crucible in which the Beatles and dozens of other better-known bands were forged. And if you see a copy of the Monks' album, also called Black Monk Time, grab it - it's amazing stuff....full text |
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