Monsters = Destroyed

Telescopic rifle aims towards the car
Jackie try to hide, you're a lonely star
The bullet shot straight, shattered John's head
Grey men looked blue in a shower of red.

So there I was reader, minding my own business, pounding away my sins on a cross trainer this lunchtime when a track just stopped me in my tracks, with almost hilarious orthopaedic results. I couldn’t reach my phone* and I just couldn’t work out who the lady was who was being so coldly scathing about JFK’s offing, over some bracingly caustic music.

Jackie, Jackie Kennedy hold onto his brains!

It was Destroy All Monsters and I have spent the rest of the day listening to them, a bit cross that I bought Bored last year, got very excited and then clearly forgot all about them. Idiot.

DAM formed in Detroit in 1973 as a noise art band and then evolved over the next 5 years into a semblance of melody, but crucially not too much. Line-ups changed and the best known one featured ex-Stooge Ron Asheton and singer Niagara**. They recruited MC5 bassist Mike Davis as soon as he was released from prison, had Rob King on drums and the brothers Larry and Ben Miller on guitars and sax.

The band never released an LP in their own lifetime, Bored is a 1991 compilation of a few of their punk-adjacent singles from ’78-9. As such they carried a whiff of that most alluring pheromone for us record nerds, The Great Lost Band (TGLB). They almost are too.

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Opener ‘Bored’ is a deadpan nod to every punk’s main complaint. The Guitar is instantly brilliant and the track swerves left into 60’s adjacent art rock, Niagara’s blank-eyed Nico-isms and Ben Miller’s sax take it away from punk, in everything but intent and I like that. The energy in the track builds and builds into tension until it gets release all over the place, nothing simple here, nothing remotely boring, just barely constrained chaos.

Second cut ‘You’re Gonna Die’ is even better. The band all light out for the hills, leaving Niagara wrestling loudly with the news of her imminent mortality; ‘You’re much too young to live any older’. Asheton’s guitar playing is just incredibly good here and again when Miller’s sax takes charge DAM are something very special indeed. In terms of attitude I get a lot of Grace Slick here and echoes of Jim Carroll’s later ‘People Who Died’ too.

Then we get ‘November 22nd, 1963’ and its bracing take on JFK’s demise. It’s exciting as hell as Niagara comes down on the more conspiratorial edge of the spectrum of opinion, ‘But Oswald, Oswald, don’t you know?
It’s a government plan‘^. There is less chaos lurking hereabouts, more melody, but a real sense of purpose, especially when the guitars unleash their payload.

Bored is front-loaded so there are slimmer pickings thereafter. ‘Meet The Creeper’ is a good mid-paced nasty cut, the sort of thing Alice Cooper might have liked circa Flush The Fashion. ‘Nobody Knows’ is much better, Ron Asheton flashing lightning to illuminate the track, it just sounds great.

Again we get some MCStooge overdrive present on ‘What Do I Get?’ but it is definitely lesser and the closer ‘Goin To Lose’ is poor, despite liberal use of the term ‘motherfucker‘, Niagara doesn’t seem to appear on this one at all and I miss her detachment and class.

And that was that, Monsters = destroyed. Bored was comped together in 1991, as I mentioned above and there have been spasmodic regroupings since but nothing that captured their elusive silver lightning spark. Far better to remember them as the smart-arse deadpan noiseniks here, surfing a beautiful barely contained chaos. TGLB? maybe.

Jackie, Jackie Kennedy hold onto his brains!

1271 Down.

*experiments on running with a gyroscopically-enhanced turntable strapped to my shoulders were not successful and resulted in the regrettable destruction of several valuable Beatles acetates.

**Lynn Rovner to her mum.

^obviously this is wrong. It was in fact everyone from Roswell who did the shootyisms, whereupon they went home and faked aliens and stuff to detract attention from them and their high Overqueen Marilyn Monroe. Fact.