The first time I ever heard “sixties garage punk” was while in high school in the early 80s via the reissued Nuggets compilations. Not knowing anything about any of it, my standard was quickly set by The Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” and the Standells’ “Dirty Water”. I liked it, but was altogether indifferent to the larger picture. Once I arrived in college in 1985, I’d hear raw snatches of sixties garage punk on the radio that I really found appealing, but it wasn’t until I heard the Back From The Grave comps that year that I went totally apeshit for the form.
At that point, anyone modern with a bowl haircut and 60s psychedelic lettering on their records was fair game for me to (try and) get super excited about, and we had records from all of ‘em at KCSB, the college radio station I fell in with. I had plenty to sample from. Yard Trauma, The Raunch Hands, Pushtwangers, Vipers, Gruesomes, Deja Voodoo, Stomachmouths, Plasticland, The Brood, Chesterfield Kings, Cynics – it was all stuff I tried and failed to like. It really took The Morlocks, the Boys From Nowhere and then The Gories to get me fired up about any modern 80s band attempting to look and sound the part. Everything else sounded tinny and too reverentially retro, especially the stuff on Voxx Records, which suffered from both poor recording quality and mediocre A&R to boot.
This is all a long way of introducing a Montreal fanzine I have from 1986 called Lost Mynds #1 which is fully steeped and marinated in a world I was trying to steep and marinate myself in that year. You can see that the cover is beautiful, and the fanzine itself looks terrific, totally home-assembled and with a great visual, cut-and-paste aesthetic. However, it was really trite and untrustworthy in the main, especially re-reading it now. They’re trying to approximate some absurd version of hipster-speak across all of their articles: “daddy-o”, “cats and kiddies”, “way out”, “fab”, “squaresville” etc. Dear Christ is that shit annoying.
That said, their remit is wide and there’s no question the folks behind this were living and breathing all the nooks & crannies of 60s-inspired punk and psych that were blossoming across the 1980s. Nearly all of the bands I mentioned in my roll call above of the eighties/sixties bands are featured or are interviewed here, with an interview with The Lyres/DMZ’s Jeff Connolly as well. There include scans from other magazines, sixties stuff, and then a few tribute pieces to actual sixties bands like The Yardbirds, Stones, Pretty Things etc. – and, and good on ‘em for this, the Ugly Ducklings – maybe Canada’s finest sixties punk band? You tell me.
When they get to seeing The Cramps live for the first time, on the A Date With Elvis tour, they’re just as sour about it being their Cramps intro as I was when I saw them for the first (and only) time in 1986, having been a fanatic for the band for the previous four years. So I can commiserate there for sure, but all that forced teenybopper talk otherwise leaves me a little cold when considering the totality of the Lost Mynds #1 fanzine.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 
The Stomachmouths crack me up because their singer sounded exactly like Cartman from South Park.
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Those bands were really doomed by the crappy 80s production, though the 90s bands overcorrected with the “lo fI” 4-track-down-the-toilet sound
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Barry, it was really the production that killed so much of this stuff. I remember The Cynics had fantastic production but the songs were just simple “c’mon baby I wanna love you”-type rave-ups. But the bands like The Vipers who actually sounded like they might actually be pretty great – those records just sounded awful to me.
But I’ll argue that you can’t overcorrect on the deliberate down-the-toilet sound….that still really does it for me…..
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The Mighty Caesars were a breath of fresh air but even they were working with a real to real; the cassette recorded blur that bands went for after that turned a lot of records into mush for me (Teengenerate comes to mind)
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