Brass Trax

If the Marshall Plan did nothing else, and by no means did it do nothing else, it changed the course of rock music. The Monks were five American servicemen stationed in Hamburg, Germany. They were too cerebral for the army, a bunch of misfits, and, when their tour of duty ended, they stuck around Germany long enough to release one of those rock albums whose influence far outstrips the number of people who actually bought it. The band recorded Black Monk Time in 1965, but it could have easily been cut a decade later.

The Monks were nerds—the sort of people who would shave tonsures into their hair and take the stage in full, black cassocks—and their music reflected it. They had started out as a typical surf band, the Five Torquays, but it wasn’t long before surf rock bored them. They fooled around in their practice space, leaning guitars against amps, banging their basses, until they had arrived at something new. It was rock music made by tinkerers, who had removed element after element and uncovered something basic: the rhythm.

Start with the drum kit. Most rock drummers rely on three instruments: the bass drum, the snare drum, and the high hat cymbals. Everything else on the kit is there for ornamentation, for accents. Roger Johnston, the Monks’ drummer, altered his approach to the drum kit. Every beat that a standard drummer would play on the high hat, Johnston would play on his toms. Every fill that belonged on the toms Johnston would play on his cymbals. The result sounds deceptively simple: a visceral and unrelenting martial beat.

Follow it up with rhythm guitar. Scratch that. Monk Dave Day had ditched his guitar. By the time the Monks had developed their signature sound, Day played banjo exclusively. Electrified banjo. A banjo with a couple of microphones jammed in. The sound was piercing, a metallic pulse that lacked the fullness and vibrato of an electric guitar. It freed Day from playing melodies, and he strummed his banjo in lockstep with Johnston’s drums, often doubling the beat for good measure.

And then there’s the bass. There is scant evidence from the Monks’ recorded output that Eddie Shaw knew how to play the bass. He would plug his instrument into a fuzz box, crank everything to top volume, and bang away, beating one or two notes into unrecognizable pulses. Noise has always been a constitutive element of rock, but Shaw’s bass, especially when played at top volume, was something altogether more extreme.

Larry Clark, the organist, was somewhat more concerned with melody, although he had a fairly abstract sense of it. Like Shaw’s bass, Clark played with enough electronic distortion, and at high enough decibel levels, that overtones were an essential part of his sound. Clark’s organ sliced across tracks, noodly stabs at hooks, when he was just banging out the rhythm with the rest of the band.

Gary Burger, the lead singer and guitarist, could just as easily tear through a monstrously stupid riff—like the classic one he devised for “Complication”— as he could twist his guitar into a maelstrom of feedback noise. Feedback was new in 1965, and Burger’s radically altered guitar lines, commonplace by the time the Stooges hit the studio, were something else. His singing voice, wry and cooly ironic, occasionally mocking, belongs to a certain tradition of hip phrasing that also claims the Fugs’ Ed Sanders, the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo as members.

Listen to “Complications”

The Monks lyrics were as nerdy as their music and as raw. Worshiping at the same altar of repetition that would later infect Krautrock and Mark E. Smith (the Fall has covered three Monks’ songs during its long existence), a typical Monks song would be little more than a phrase or two repeated for a couple of minutes, with non sequitur interjections from Burger. Typical topics included the malice of women, the malice of the Monks toward women, and advice for women named Maria. (”Drunken Maria, don’t sleep. Sleepy Maria, don’t drink.”) Their songs could be political—”Complication”—is a snotty rebuke to an unnamed authority figure who sends soldiers to their deaths—but that message was secondary to the band’s sound, its rhymic pulse.

Listen to “Drunken Maria”

“Monk Time,” for instance, features Burger warbling, sounding more like a priest at a pulpit than a Monk behind a guitar. He excoriates the army, the Vietnam war, and the atomic bomb. He celebrates Pussy Galore, the James Bond heroine. It’s a statement of hip politics: Disengagement from political violence and joyful celebration of pop culture. The Monks lacked the sanctimoniousness—if not the sincerity—of stateside protest bands. They didn’t like the war, but they would much rather have a good time than to dwell on it.

Listen to “Monk Time”

As Shaw put it, “The Monks were not political…All we said is that we didn’t like the army. What army? Who cares what army. And we didn’t like the atomic bomb. Who does?”

The entire recorded output of the Monks, one album and a handful of singles, clocks in at under an hour. It’s almost the perfect amount of music, considering the band’s aesthetic, a handful of rhythmic bombs that still sound fresh today.

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