Garage Collector
Ever wonder what became of groups like the Weads, the Vi Dels, Lonnie and the Legends, the Tasmanians, Cryan Shames, Chaos Incorporated, and the Beavers? Me neither. But I've been obsessing over the extremely under-the-radar careers of these and a few hundred other 1960s garage bands thanks to Garage Hangover, an amazing collection of data, images, and mp3s, I discovered via Portland, Oregon, nostalgia trove Stumptown Confidential.
Categorized conveniently by both state and country (don't miss the Confusion and the Dinosaurs, paired on a single released by an India cigarette company), Garage Hangover is a wiki-like cooperative affair. Today the site features the Vistells, the Cobras, and other bands from the late-sixties Santa Cruz scene, copiously illustrated with photos, business cards, posters, and the precious vinyl itself. The music, reflecting an era, is a naïve and often-charming blend of surf rock, English pop, and psychedelia.
At a time when releasing a 45 was somewhat more complicated than producing an mp3 track on your iMac with aptly named Garageband, many of these recordings involved the assistance of radio DJs, parents, and other sponsors for labels no one has heard of before or since. They weren't always purely commercial, either. A single released by Montreal's bilingual Les Harmonicos was given away as a souvenir at "Canada Family Day," with the same song sung in French on one side and in English on the other.
Garage Hangover's collection represents merely the tip of its stylistic iceberg, of course. But I imagine it becoming the center of a scene that has to date been documented mainly in the pages of equally obscure low-budget, long-out-of-print, barely circulated books and zines. This is posterity.