All right, this is the first in a bunch of weekly topics that have the intention of de-shitifying the Music forum and actually promoting real discussion, etc… Afura, me, and a few other dudes will be posting a new one each week, so be sure to keep an eye out for them. So anyway…

GARAGE-ROCK!

“…The name that has been unofficially coined for them ‘punk rock’ seems particularly fitting in this case, for if nothing else they exemplified the berserk pleasure that comes with being on-stage outrageous, the relentless middle-finger drive and determination offered only by rock and roll at its finest…” - Lenny Kaye, in his introduction to the seminal 1972 garage compilation ‘Nuggets’.

If you’ll listen to a word I say,
You’ll try strychnine some day.
It’ll make you jump, it’ll make you shout,
It’ll even knock you out.
                           - ‘Strychnine’, The Sonics


Ah, the Sixties… That magical time of free love, acid, and blah blah blah blah Woodstock blah blah Counterculture blah blah blah Hippies blah blah etc, etc… You’ve heard it all before, all that trite revisionist horseshit about the “psychedelic revolution” that for all it’s self-congratulatory flatulence ended up changing nothing at all but the size of Timothy Leary’s checkbook. But there was another revolution going on in the Sixties, a musical one that’s usually glossed over and forgotten… One made up of pissed-off teenagers from small towns all around the country, the ones who spent all their allowances on cheap guitars, scuzzy fuzz pedals and sharp clothes, the ones who tried to sound like the Beatles but ended up sounding a lot weirder and a lot nastier… They wrote stripped-down, raw three-chord anthems that endure to this day, which in fact seem even more relevant and necessary than ever in this age of radio-friendly pseudo-punk fluff like the Hives and the Strokes. In fact, at it’s best, garage transcended it’s primitive roots, giving us some of the most extrordinary bands of that or any other era:  records like the Sonic’s “Boom” album are easily as hard-hitting as anything punk ever produced, and even shortlived one-hit-wonders like the Brogues were capable of putting more energy and power into a single song then most bands could produce in a whole slew of albums. So here’s a look at some of the bands that ended up defining the weirder edges of garage-rock…

NOTE: Since there are a lot of bands listed here, and since not everyone has the time or inclination to check out a large list of videos, I’ll put hash marks (###) beside the names of the bands that are particularly noteworthy. Basically, all the bands here are worth checking out, but the hash mark ones are the ones you really definitely super HAVE to listen to.

The Wailers:
The very first garage band, from waaaaay back in ‘58. More of an R‘n’B band, really, but their raunchy energy, lo-fi style and the streak of deranged energy in their songs made them a direct influence on other legendary Seattle bands like the Kingsmen and the Sonics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmh1hVNeSiY 
Interestingly, they were the first ‘garage’ band to cover the Richard Berry song ‘Louie, Louie’: The famous cover of the song by the Kingsmen is a direct copy of the Wailers version… Listen for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSyIcOmupmc . The first version is the original, the second by the Wailers, the third by the Kingsmen.

###The Rumblers:###
Not just a great band, but an important throwback to the original fifties punks: These dudes spent their time playing backing music to late-night drag races across deserted nighttime streets, and that sense of danger, recklessness and swaggering bravado really comes across on their classic instrumental ‘Boss’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkT5HWUSQBE . Legendary psychobilly pioneers The Cramps later copped the guitar riff for their excellent song ‘Garbageman’…

The Seeds:
The Seeds never got a huge commercial reception, despite (or possibly due to) their gloriously raw, raggedly psychedelic sound. But when they did finally break, it was with the wonderfully surly ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmHTyLBIZ1g . The track was later featured on Lenny Kayes’ “Nuggets” compilation, where it has since received acclaim as a 60s punk classic. Another great song is their ‘Can’t Seem To Male You Mine’… A slower-paced love song shot through with a slurred, moaning vocal and magnificently off-key guitar that cements their reputation as garage heroes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV8KvKYRxig .

The Standells:
Best known for their track ‘Dirty Water’, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5apEctKwiD8 ) that’s since adopted as a kind of local anthem for the city of Boston… You’d be wrong to just write them off as a one-hit wonder, though, since they had a slew of killer songs, especially the excellent ‘Good Guys Don’t Wear White’, which was later covered by Minor Threat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4w19TOuE0&feature=related

###The Sonics:###
Listen, did you really think I’d be able to do a whole thing on proto-punk and not mention  The Sonics?They fucking are proto-punk, man. In fact, scratch that. They’re punk, period. They made records so sleazy, so trashy and raw and fucked-up and powerful that people are still trying to catch up to them.
All right, first up is ‘Psycho’, which is in many ways the ultimate Sonics song: a snapping, insistent drumbeat and scuzzy sax backs Jerry Roslie’s incredible, unhinged vocals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-_0V0IXEkc
Then there’s ‘Have Love, Will Travel’, which I believe was originally by our old friend Richard Berry of ‘Louie, Louie’ fame. No matter how hard they tray, all the obnoxious frat-rock bands in the world can’t detract from the concentrated awesomeness of this song. Just… listen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20S_kwNb4rg
‘Boss Hoss’: no bunch of suburban kids in fucking angora sweaters should be able to make music this good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV3JD9eniKE&feature=related
And finally, another version of ‘Louie, Louie’. This is to the Kingsmen version what fucking pterodactyls were to happy little robins. Or something. Just listen to it and tell me that isn’t punk rock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhM5k_EGzaQ&feature=related

? And The Mysterians:
All right, now I’ve shot my wad about the Sonics, it’s time to move onto another great band: ? and the Mysterians. You know ‘em as the dudes who wrote the great ‘96 Tears’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrTnaPa9BaA . They wrote a whole bunch of other killer psych-punk tracks, but there are no videos on Youtube and I‘m too lazy to upload them myself. But they’re awesome, anyway.

###The Hergs:###
It should come as no surprise to find out that Australia had a thriving garage scene: after all, this was the country that would later give us seminal 70s proto-punk bands like the Saints and Radio Birdman, and later great garage-revivalists like the Scientists. But even next to bands like those, the Herg’s cover of Vincent Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’ (which was featured in the Rockabilly thread) is really something: a menacing, percussive thrash with a rusty, barbed-wire guitar riff, even better than the original. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXee3JeXgXo .
Weirdly enough, listening too it again the song it most reminds me of is ‘Final Solution’ by Rocket From The Tombs (and later, Pere Ubu)… I dunno, something about the hushed beat, the vocals, and the structure of the thing...

Count Five:
The Count Five were an acclaimed garage band known for great songs like ‘Peace Of Mind’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5IH9-QqUT0&feature=related ) and… Ah, fuck it. You know it and I know it, no matter how many songs these dudes have made, none of them will ever even come close to matching the one they’ll always be remembered for… I speak, of course, of that mighty garage perennial, ‘Psychotic Reaction’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODR6rGcluRs . It’s so good it managed to steal the show on the fucking ‘Nuggets’ album, for chrissakes. Now that’s hardcore.

Thirteenth Floor Elevators:
And speaking of the ‘Nuggets’ bands, let’s not forget Austin’s mighty Thirteenth Floor Elevators… For my money, the second greatest psychedelic band of all time. Roky Erikson’s yelping vocals and the droney, repetitive guitar parts (not to mention the electric jug) made their first album ‘The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators’ into a classic, and you can easily see why on tracks like ‘Roller Coaster’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsKny8WnktI ) and, of course, their hit ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJ2U_oowBQ ).

The Monkees:
I kinda debated for while about putting them on here, since in many ways the Monkees represented the vapid, manufactured kind of pseudo-garage fluff that was responsible for many people’s unfair dismissal of the genre. However, they still got on the list because of their song ‘Stepping Stone’, which became a staple of the 80s Washington hardcore-punk scene, mainly due to a great, simple riff and what bizarrely appears to be a proto-hardcore breakdown at the 0.56 mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XgmUqTt7I&feature=related .

###Love:###
Remember how I said the Thirteenth Floor Elevators were the second greatest psychedelic band of all time? Well, these guys were the first. Arthur Lee and friends made one of the greatest albums ever, ‘Forever Changes’, full of baroque chords and strange moments of beauty. ‘Then what the fuck are they doing in a proto-punk list?’ you cry… Well, (a) they had a dark sense of humour and a knack for disturbing imagery that comes through in even their prettiest songs (who could forget the immortal opening line “Well, the snot has caked against my pants / It has turned into crystal”) and (b), because they wrote ‘Seven & Seven Is’, an incredible blast of snarling punk energy and light speed drumming, culminating in a literal atomic blast. The Ramones covered it, but even they couldn’t match the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PStzQW6XVkM .

The Uniques:
A southern rock band helmed by future country singer Joe Stampley, they’re best known for their song ‘You Ain’t Tough’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJB-DKoXD1A )… They were really better at Orbison-style ballads, though, as their irresistibly melodic ‘All These Things’ proves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs3KRdu5zWk&feature=related

Captain Beefheart:
Yeah, yeah, I know he wasn’t garage. But there’s no goddamn way you could do a thing on sixties punk and not include Captain Beefheart somewhere… So I can only link you to the video for ‘Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do” and urge you to pick up a copy of ‘Trout Mask Replica’ this very fucking instant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCSPf5Viwd0
Incidentally, the reason Beefheart’s on the list and Zappa isn’t can be best expressed through a half-remembered quote from “The Mighty Boosh”s Noel Fielding… Something along the lines of “Zappa was weird because he’d worked out how to be, but Beefheart was weird because he was.”

The Mops:
Famous for being Japan’s first psychedelic pop band, the Mops were far too good to be written off as just a cultural oddity, mixing traditional garage twang with distinctly eastern melodies to scintillating results. Just listen to the fuzzy, scuzzy ‘Blind Bird’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKiTWRxeTo

###The Litter:###
To be honest, I know pretty much nothing about these guys. But they wrote the stone-cold garage-punk classic ‘Action Woman’, so that’s all right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2dCjHcfDpo

The Magicians:
Not really a garage band per se, more a pop/rock band with folk and blues elements, who occasionally had a kind of garage-y sound. But fuck the pedantic quibbling over genres, and listen to ‘Invitation To Cry’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJB-DKoXD1A , a touching and tuneful pop song given a raw edge by distorted, squalling guitars and a wonderfully tormented vocal.

The Velvet Underground:
Fun Fact #544: It’s actually a federal offence not to mention the Velvet Underground in any discussion of early punk music. Strange but true. But to be fair, they would have made the list anyway… I mean, one of the reasons they were so great is the fact that for all their subversiveness and experimentalism, they also wrote really fucking good songs, mixing La Monte Young drones with garage crunch to startlingly brilliant results… ’Waiting For The Man’ is a good example, with the band’s distorted rhythmic groove accentuating rather than distracting from what’s essentially a great AM-pop song about copping heroin in Harlem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UpFGoJHwLI

The Soulmen:
Once again proving that great garage knows no nationality, the Soulmen were a Cream-influenced Czechoslovakian band best known for the enormously catchy melodic garage-pop of ‘I Wish I Were’. I still can’t get the tune out of my head… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoU8P611BVs&feature=related .

###The Brogues:###
The Brogues prove, to me anyway, that there is no such thing as a fair and just universe. They should have been fucking massive, man. They should have been hailed as one of the greatest bands ever throughout the world and have a dozen supermodels sucking them off every hour of every day, if there was any justice. Instead, they broke up after just six tracks and the only video I could find that had them (namely, their massively, deeply, contusion-causingly brilliant cover of ’I Ain’t No Miracle Worker’) was in the backround to one of those fucking obnoxious videos where some smarmy-ass hipster kid dances about to old records. Do me a favor, please… Downsize the video. Turn up the volume. And listen to what should have been one of the biggest bands in the world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EygEGOpO4MA

Music Machine:
Creators of fuzzed-up garage snarl ‘Talk Talk’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJR_KGZO4U0 ) , it’s easy to see why the Music Machine swiftly became legends of the genre. They later moved onto a more psychedelic sound, with flutes and shit, but they still had the swagger that kept them ahead of other bands.

The Chessmen:
One of the coolest things about garage was the fact that every city and state seemed to have it’s own little scene going on… the ‘Garage Hangover’ article for the Chessmen says that ‘The Chessmen feature in almost every account of the Dallas music scene in the mid and late '60s’. See? I bet you never even knew Dallas had a garage scene! I know I sure didn’t… Anyway, it apparently did, and it spawned the great song ‘I Need You There’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLWtCJ3ZJs .
And now that I think about it, if you have even the vaguest intrest in 60s garage then you need to visit Garage Hangover: http://www.garagehangover.com/ . Tons of great garage bands from all over the world, and you can download free mp3s of their out-of-print songs. A good chunk of the music on this list came from the site, so check it out if you get a chance.

###The Trashmen:###
A Minnesota band specialising in surf-rock, the Trashmen had a few great songs, but by far the most (justifiably) famous is the stomping, burping, gleefully deranged surf-punk-thrash of ‘Surfin’ Bird’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dbbezhL_Co . As their later cover of the song proved, the song soon found its way to the ears of the Ramones…

Elastik Band:
Authors of the hilariously un-PC punk classic ‘Spazz’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsouz4Rh_R8 ), which became a garage-rock standard mainly due to a wired, snarling guitar riff that burns a hole through the speakers and right into your brain. Then the Hives ripped it off for their Timbaland collaberation ‘Throw It On Me’, and made millions.
Did I mention that I hate the Hives?

###Zipps:###
Standing alongside equally-legendary Dutch band the Oustiders, Zipps cemented their reputation as garage heroes with their track ’Kicks and Chicks’, which is genuinely one of the best and most catchy songs ever written. The video is great too… Especially since so many bands today try to look as disaffected and cool as possible during concerts, so it’s refreshing to see a bunch of guys playing music and looking like they’re having a total blast in the process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paLmrFlYMxU

Chocolate Watchband:
Poppy and baroque, a lot of the Chocolate Watchband’s stuff would fall under ‘psychedelic pop’ more than ‘garage’, but as their song ‘Misty Lane’ shows (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zytp-qEC9PY ) when they did get it into their heads to play some dirty rock & roll, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Belfast Gypsies:
Ireland’s own contribution to the world of garage… A kind of offshoot of the beter known band Them (who featured a young Van Morrison and wrote ‘Gloria’, which only just trails behind ‘Louie, Louie’ in the garage-anthem stakes) and produced by infamous garage svengali Kim Fowley, their raw blitzkreig racket resulted in their song ‘Secret Police’ getting heavy rotation in Detroit, where it swiftly became a favorite of Iggy Pop… In fact, listening to songs like ‘People Let’s Freak Out’, you could even say that Iggy’s vocals with the Stooges bore a distinct similarity to those of Belfast Gypsies singer Jack McAuley. Total bullshit? You decide! http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=289952525

The Atlantics:
Another Australian surf-band, these guys were no bland instrumentalist pussies… Just listen to this (unnamed) track, an almighty clanging racket with a great call-and-response chorus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cm3solF6K4# . ‘Come On!’, indeed.

The Rationals:
Coming out of the same Ann Arbor, Michigan scene that’d later spawn the MC5 and the Stooges, the Rationals were another band to rival the Brogues in the ‘shoulda been a contender’ stakes. More of a blue-eyed-soul band than a garage band, but as this video (which collects three of their songs) shows, they definitely had a strong garage edge to their sound. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jisrUUzQOK4&feature=related#

###The Monks:###
The Monks were, like the Sonics, a classic example of a proto-punk band actually being much better than most of the music they inspired. A bunch of US marines stationed in Germany, the Monks cut their hair into tonsures, picked up guitars and banjos, and set out to become the self-proclaimed ‘anti-Beatles’. They wrote songs that were short, weird, distorted, brutish, heavily percussive and bizarrely tuneful… A classic example is the magnificently bile-soaked tribal stomp of ‘I Hate You’, a song so good that even the Fall’s cover couldn’t top the original’s gloriously deranged energy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l8lefkf2gY
Also, here‘s their equally-awesome song ‘Monk Time’, a hilarious mix of shrieking, mocking vocals and demented lyrics ("Ah, you think like I think, you're a Monk, I'm a Monk, we're all Monks!"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rofyCU8ulPw
There’s also a few good live clips floating around on Youtube… So, yeah. Pick up a copy of their album ‘Black Monk Time’ if you get a chance.

The Barbarians:
It’s a testament to the quality and the durability of the Barbarian’s music that they’re not remembered as just another 60s novelty band, despite the fact that their most famous song ‘Moulty’ is a tribute to their hook-handed drummer (seriously), Victor ‘Moulty’ Moulton. But their classic ‘Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl’ showed that they could rival the Standells in the poppy garage-punk stakes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thQY2-J3Xog&feature=related ). Another great song of theirs is the surf-influenced pop song ‘You’ve Got To Understand’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLUvz9LHzrE ), which, okay, is hardly punk rock, but it’s pretty and has a really catchy melody, so… yeah.
 
MC5:
I’ll admit it: I don’t particularly like the MC5. They were basically just a good-time boogie band wrapped up in a bunch of half-assed radical politics. Still, as good-time boogie bands go, they were one of the best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2LCErRSqIs . Anyway, you have to mention them, if only to get to…

###The Stooges:###
Simply put, the Stooges were everything rock’n’roll should be: dirty, noisy, violent, sexy, dangerous. While Alice Cooper was toying with fake blood, Iggy Pop was slashing his chest to ribbons rolling on broken glass onstage. While David Bowie was trying to simulate decadence and transgressiveness, the Stooges were fucking living it. For me, anyway, the entire punk rock movement peaked in 1970 with ‘Fun House’… Everything after that felt like a cop-out, like a failed attempt to rebottle the wild, vicious lightning the Stooges so effortlessly invoked. Scott Kempner, guitarist for excellent CBGBs-era punk band The Dictators, said it best after witnessing one of their concerts: “Every single show involved actual fucking blood. From then on, rock & roll could never be anything less to me. Whatever I did - whether I was writing, or playing - there was blood on the pages, there was blood on the strings, because anything less than that was just bullshit, and a waste of fucking time.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_XCECbAEU&feature=related .

…So, anyway, that’s it. Garage pretty much burned out after 1970, when short, heartfelt songs about real life were replaced by the meandering, self-indulgent wank that was humourlessly known as ‘progressive rock’. The irony was, of course, that garage was much more progressive in it’s own way than any of that dilettantish art-school style-over-substance bullshit: garage-rock was about putting energy and soul and passion above mere technical proficiency, about making the music you liked and ignoring all the hyped-up trendsetting going on around you, about the beguiling idea that a bunch of high-school losers with cheap instruments and only three chords between them could make music at least as good and as relevant as any produced by the fucking billionaire superstars with string sections and unlimited expense accounts. So in that respect, at least, garage really was punk rock.

Man, you make really good topics. I haven't finished reading this one yet, I'm up to Captain Beefheart but a few of the bands I really like so far are Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Hergs (I checked around for a few of their albums and couldn't find anything - think you could point me in the right direction?), and the Sonics, but I'll definitely be checking them all out. Seriously dude, thanks a lot for posting this, I'm really enjoying it!

im going to take you down regarding progressive rock just you wait!

love rules, he died like last year and it made me so angry i destroyed a juice bar.

So I don't know if I have enough time or interest in Punk to explore every artist here.  Is there one that you would definitively recommend the most?  I scanned and didn't see any such recommendations.

Man, you make really good topics. I haven't finished reading this one yet, I'm up to Captain Beefheart but a few of the bands I really like so far are Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Hergs (I checked around for a few of their albums and couldn't find anything - think you could point me in the right direction?), and the Sonics, but I'll definitely be checking them all out. Seriously dude, thanks a lot for posting this, I'm really enjoying it!

Glad you liked it! Unfortunately, I think the Hergs were one of those bands who only made one single before splitting... Still,  you can download it free from garagehangover: http://www.garagehangover.com/?q=Hergs

im going to take you down regarding progressive rock just you wait!

I just knew there was gonna be a prog backlash... I still stand by what I said, although I'm willing to concede that early Genesis was awesome.

So I don't know if I have enough time or interest in Punk to explore every artist here. Is there one that you would definitively recommend the most? I scanned and didn't see any such recommendations.

I'm not sure, what kind of music do you like? And most of the stuff here isn't really modern, Sex Pistols-ish punk or whatever, mainly just fast, raw 60s pop.
That said, if you listen to one protopunk band from the list, let it be the Sonics. One psych band, Thirteenth Floor Elevators. One pop band, the Magicians. One soul band, the Brogues. That pretty much covers most of the stuff here, so just pick your favorite genre from the ones I've listed and try it out!

Sadly the only names on there I recognized were Chocolate Watchband, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground and the Monkees... of whom I am only even a little bit familiar with 2... sadly

heh I wouldnt even know where to begin to try to get into this music.. because as far as rock music goes lately I've been grooving to a lot of late 60s early 70s stuff like Quicksilver Messenger Service and of course as always King Crimson (in part because at work the music must have guitars and vocals and must be in english because the chef is a jackass about music) anyway yeah is there a good starting point that you would recommend?

Sadly the only names on there I recognized were Chocolate Watchband, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground and the Monkees... of whom I am only even a little bit familiar with 2... sadly

heh I wouldnt even know where to begin to try to get into this music.. because as far as rock music goes lately I've been grooving to a lot of late 60s early 70s stuff like Quicksilver Messenger Service and of course as always King Crimson (in part because at work the music must have guitars and vocals and must be in english because the chef is a jackass about music) anyway yeah is there a good starting point that you would recommend?

Well, I think two members of the Brogues went on to become founder members of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and I read somewhere that the two group's sound was very similar (for their early stuff, anyway)... So maybe try them out? I'm not really familiar with either QMS or King Crimson so I'm not sure what to recommend. Can anyone help me out here?

I still stand by what I said, although I'm willing to concede that early Genesis was awesome.

oh we're done then because other than some pop bands that adopted a few prog sensibilities and get the title applied to them its bad.

wellll magma is good so that's two.

also your topics are the best, this forum sucks every time someone posts in a topic that isn't one of these.

how the hell is 13th Floor Elevator proto punk?
They are psychedelic R&B-esque

how the hell is 13th Floor Elevator proto punk?
They are psychedelic R&B-esque

Well, yeah. Psychedelic r&b-esque... that's also proto-punk. Here's why:
(1) The vocalist, Roky Erikson. He screeches, moans, snarls, silmultaneously feral and psychotic... Even today, his voice can still raise a shiver through the spine.
(2) The sound: Droning, coiled, hypnotically repetitive riffs that conveyed a sense of pressure, of slow menace, of smoggy claustrophobia... Especially harsh when you consider the album was made in 1966, at a time when the charts were filled with songs like 'The Sound of Silence', 'Yellow Submarine', 'Good Vibrations', etc, etc. Fucking soft-pop singalongs dominated the radio, and these guys came out with a sound that was openly hostile and freaky, that was the ultimate in bad vibrations. The English bands were into psych as whimsical nursery rhyme, the west coast bands were into it as a way of simulating a good acid trip, but the 13th Floor Elevators used psychedelica like an assault rifle, as a sort of musical attack.
(3) The lyrics. "Reverberation, driving your mind insane. Reverberation, causing your blood to drain, leaving just charred remains..." Pretty damn heavy stuff, I'm sure you'll agree... Especially when you conside that Jefferson Airplane, the supposed embodiment of all things psychedelic, were singing stuff like "hey hey woman make me happy like I've never known before, say you have ever known no heart fore me anymore"...
(4) 'You're Gonna Miss Me' is one of the great proto-punk anthems, a great four-chord riff and Erikson's sneering vocals combining to make one of the single most brilliantly vicious musical "fuck you"s ever put on record. Startlingly unromantic too, considering the era.

how the hell is 13th Floor Elevator proto punk?
They are psychedelic R&B-esque

dj soup, i love you but why do you keep posting garbage about genres : (

I'm not sure, what kind of music do you like? And most of the stuff here isn't really modern, Sex Pistols-ish punk or whatever, mainly just fast, raw 60s pop.
That said, if you listen to one protopunk band from the list, let it be the Sonics. One psych band, Thirteenth Floor Elevators. One pop band, the Magicians. One soul band, the Brogues. That pretty much covers most of the stuff here, so just pick your favorite genre from the ones I've listed and try it out!

Well I'm interested in just about anything so.  Anyway, four bands is a lot less intimidating than nine thousand so thanks!

hey guy, I don't know if this is something that interests you but if you want, I can put these on the mainsite. they could use some formatting but they are good topics!

hey guy, I don't know if this is something that interests you but if you want, I can put these on the mainsite. they could use some formatting but they are good topics!

I dunno man, Afura asked me about it as a way of specifically improving the Music forum so it's not just '10 wackiest kazoo breakowns!' or whatever...
Still, it's pretty much the same people replying and stuff each time, and I've a feeling this thread has racked up all the Music replies it can muster, so I'd say go for it! 
(Wow, first time using a foget picture... I feel vaguely dirty...)

Man, I love your topics.

It's just a shame that the only song you can find anywhere by MC5 is Kick Out the Jams. Rocket Reducer No. 62 is soooooooooo much better, and definitely shows of their punk side.