Alright, My Name’s Gary

People often ask me why I can frequently be seen in my dressing gown, being balding, aggressive and antisocial in the afternoons. It isn’t that I’m a dangerous borderline street crazy with a penchant for exposing myself accidentally, it is in fact an artful tribute to an obscure American/German garage band from the 60’s. Honest, officer.

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Five ex-GI’s demobbed in Germany formed a band. Two advertising dudes prevailed on Polydor to sign them up and made them a radically different, radically tough proposition – monk’s habits, tonsures, a calculated insouciance, a crudely amplified banjo, disciplined ferocity, they were certainly no novelty act. Honing their amphetamine-crazed live act in Hamburg, night after nacht after nacht they became truly formidable. In 1966 they cut an LP.

Nobody realised it at the time but these scary cavemen were the harbingers of all manner of nihilistic Sturm und Drang that was coming down the tracks in a decade’s time.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you the Monks Black Monk Time. Here’s the first track:

Alright, my name's Gary.
Let's go, it's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time now!
You know we don't like the army.
What army?
Who cares what army?
Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?
Mad Viet Cong.
My brother died in Vietnam!
James Bond, who was he?
Stop it, stop it, I don't like it!
It's too loud for my ears.
Pussy Galore's comin' down and we like it.
We don't like the atomic bomb.
Stop it, stop it, I don't like it . . . stop it!
What's your meaning Larry?
Ahh, you think like I think!
You're a monk, I'm a monk, we're all monks!
Dave, Larry, Eddie, Roger, everybody, let's go!
It's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time now!

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Ex GI’s singing about Vietnam give the whole thing a level of gravitas, regardless of how crazed-arooni that stinkingly primeval beat is. How on earth was this allowed to happen?! who had sanctioned this?! if the Monks had gone back to the US to play and record, there is simply no way they would have been allowed to make this LP. That is something to be treasured.

The likes of ‘I Hate You’, ‘Boys Are Boys And Girls Are Choice’, ‘Drunken Maria’ and ‘Shut Up’ speak for themselves, they mutter and threaten you darkly from behind dumpsters in dark alleyways; engage at your peril.

I do love me an unhealthily deranged garage band banger and Black Monk Time certainly has enough to sate my appetite, but there is a lot more at play here too. Larry Clark slathers a lot of creepy crawly organ sounds around the place, giving the odd moment a proto Doors/Stranglers feel – 1537 fave ‘I Hate You’ being a menacing primo case in point.

There are so many odd corners and diversions hereabouts, other faves are the apocalypse rising pop smarts of ‘Higgle-Dy – Piggle-Dy’, which sounds like a meaner Zappa to me; the moronic strafing beat of ‘Complicated’ and the insane dragster space boogie of ‘Blast Off!’. Nothing for the norms here folks, jog on squares!

I think what I may like best about Black Monk Time is that rarest musical thing of all, it is the product of a totally enclosed musical ecosystem. It is the aural equivalent of the island of Madagascar or Conan Doyle’s The Lost World – evolution has run its own course, almost entirely unhindered by outside influence. The Monks were flogged all around Germany by their managers, playing the most unsuitable gigs in the most unsuitable alpine locales, usually to unappreciative alpine locals. Outside Hamburg there was no scene to draw on and the Monks quickly learned how to fend for themselves musically and fightily.

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Needless to say none of the above was a recipe for global epoch-changing success and the usual resentments festered, the band breaking apart after several subsequent attempts by the label to tame them. Still the Monks left a smear of cold antimatter behind them that like minded freak beat trawlers and collators of the grotesque have been flipping out to ever since*.

I hate you all. In a good way.

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As I’m not a trillionaire my copy of Black Monk Time is a 2009 Light In The Attic reissue that I bought back then with wonderful expansive sleevenotes and a 16″x24″ poster that I haven’t quite got around to putting up on my bedroom ceiling yet. Of all the bonus tracks the only one worth having, for the non-insaniac completist, is the improvised-as-time-filler ‘Monk Chant (Live), which gets pretty out there.

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1127 Down.

*as the sleevenotes carrying the testimonies of Jello Biafra, Iggy, Jay Reatard, Krist Novoselic, Jon Spencer and Mark E Smith will attest.