Monks

“The revolution of '68 could have happened two years earlier if only people had understood the sound of the Monks”

(Jochen Irmler – Faust)

“The Monks were born in the same damned clubs as the Beatles, but three years late, and their music oozes delirium and madness from every pore.”

(Julian Cope)

How would the Beatles have sounded in 1966 if they'd been a gang of musical hooligans gripped by artistic fits? You'll find the answer on “Black Monk Time” by the Monks, an album released the same year the Fab Four from Liverpool put out “Revolver”, the record that finished what its predecessor “Rubber Soul” had started – severing the ties to their early beat sound and launching the Beatles toward the grandiose psychedelic pop of “Sgt. Pepper's“. Just as the Beatles were setting off down the road that would deliver them to myth, the Monks, in parallel, were burning through their own legend in the space of a single album, “Black Monk Time”, which would go on to become a cult favorite for music obsessives the world over.

In most cases, a cult record doesn't automatically become a landmark, but “Black Monk Time” is a story unto itself, because no record of that era sounds quite so deranged, even as it doesn't entirely renounce the pop of its time. Indeed, traces of the musical fashion of the early Sixties – beat – can still be found in the sound the Monks engineered; only it's a corrupted beat, rhythmically tribal and melodically unhinged. In effect, just as beat music, having reached its golden moment, was starting to be cast aside by most, along came “Black Monk Time” to forge a new version of it, darker and more visionary: there are guitar fuzz tones and distorted basses that pioneer noise-rock; there are organs fit for a psychedelic black mass, anticipating the Doors and Pink Floyd (no small feat!); and finally, there are dissonant quirks – the brilliant idea of electrifying a six-string banjo and distorting its tone is a stroke of genius – that would be fully developed in the kraut-rock of Faust and Can.

But who were the Monks? Characters not entirely sound of mind, one might say: five American soldiers with an austere look (long black cassocks) and a dogmatic hair–style (monastic tonsures), hence the name Monks. The five marines had met at American military bases in West Germany, where they lived and where they formed the embryonic version of the band: the Five Torquays. It was two young German managers, Walther Niemann and Karl-Heinz Remy, on the hunt for the next big musical phenomenon, who advised the Five Torquays to change their name and revamp their look. From then on, Gary Burger (vocals and guitar), Larry Clark (organ), Roger Johnston (drums), Eddie Shaw (bass) and Dave Day (banjo), together with their two managers, became less a band than a genuine artistic commune, one that paired their groundbreaking musical vision with stimulating nods to the artistic avant-garde – from the Dadaist nonsense poetry found in the song lyrics to the Suprematist painting of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, echoed in the album's cover art.

The twelve songs that make up the record portray a band that, against the sonic cleanliness of the Beatles, the choral exuberance of the Beach Boys, the bluesy provocations of the Stones and the rebellious ferocity of the Who, set rhythmic delirium, derailing vocal lines and jagged, warped-sounding strings. “Black Monk Time” is one of the masterpieces of garage-rock – in fact, it's fair to say the Monks are the cornerstone band of the genre, without meaning any disrespect to Nazz and the Deviants.

Then again, a track like “Monk Time” couldn't be anything other than a garage-rock manifesto: wild drumming and clattering guitars used almost as percussion, delirious spoken-word declamations and a psychotic organ riff. Two other anthems are “Complication”, with its drunken-surf-band vocal counterpoints, and “Blast Off”, a dizzying music-box tune introduced by lysergic overdrive.

Then there are tracks of a brilliant sort of lunacy, like “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy”, a grotesque dance propped up by brutal polyrhythms, or the padded-cell cabaret of “Drunken Maria”. The Monks' songbook sifts through many of the styles of mainstream music from the first half of the sixties and bends them to their anarchic creativity: limping folk-rock (“I Hate You”), deranged doo-wop (“We Do Wie Du”), cut-rate yodeling and shameless falsettos – all elements spun through the absurd vortex of their art.

A legendary record, then, “Black Monk Time”, one that has left its mark on entire generations of musicians, from the possessed Cramps to the ironic Fall, from the furious Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins to the unlikely Beastie Boys. Nearly impossible to find for years, it has recently been reissued by Universal. Needless to say, for anyone who missed it the first time around, this is the perfect chance to make up for it: the hour of the black monks has come again.

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26/04/2009