'Knights of Fuzz' DVD chronicles this underrated, lo-fi genre
Garage rock rolls on
By Sarah Mauet
smauet@azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.14.2006
If the late '60s gave birth to garage music, the '80s brought the genre's baby boomers.
Just like the previous generation, the garage rock revivalists played music that was fun, individualist, had a sense of style and didn't have to be commercial to be good. And best of all, with its fuzzy guitars, organ riffs, sneering vocals and lo-fi recordings, it was something anyone could do.
Garage guru Timothy Gassen has chronicled the revival, which continues to inspire generations of neo-garage bands, in a new DVD, "The Knights of Fuzz" ($21.98), released to stores on Tuesday.
"About every five years the garage underground scene goes through a rebirth where there's a big new burst of bands that get excited by this," the music fanatic said. "We're in the middle of that right now."
The resurgence of garage can be seen in the success of bands such as the White Stripes, the Raveonettes, the Strokes and the Vines — all of which have sounds that hark back to the origins of garage rock.
"People listening to these bands are wondering what else is out there," said the former Arizona Daily Star reporter who is married to Star editorial writer Sarah Garrecht Gassen. "In the mainstream arena they're only being shown a couple bands, but there are thousands of them in this genre of music."
That's where Gassen, a journalist, author, filmmaker, audio producer, garage band frontman and veritable human music encyclopedia, comes in.
He used his multimedia experience to expand upon his garage reference books (1990's "Echoes in Time" and 1995's "The Knights of Fuzz") to create a DVD that covers the garage and psychedelic music scene since 1980. The DVD shares a name with his second book (the entirety of which is on the disc), but the similarities end there. While the book was mostly a reference for music lovers, the DVD is as entertaining as it is informative.
"Whether you know what the underground garage and psychedelic movement is about or not, hopefully you can pop this one disc in and you can find out what it's all about," Gassen said.
The DVD contains a documentary film about the history of garage rock as well as almost 20 full-length music videos from bands such as the Chesterfield Kings, the Fuzztones, Girl Trouble and one of Gassen's own bands, Marshmallow Overcoat. The disc also contains radio-show interviews, a 26-song audio compilation, photographs, fanzine reproductions and feature articles on the scene.
Most garage bands never saw major radio or MTV play, so this DVD may be the first opportunity for fans to actually see many of those groups perform.
Gassen grinned as he talked about why he wanted to chronicle this underground art form.
"It's like musical graffiti," he said. "We exist. You can't say we don't exist anymore."
The DVD is ambitiously called Vol. 1.
"Vol. 2 might be just bands from 2000 to now, just the last five years, because I kind of underserved them," said Gassen. "There's a lot of them, and they have a lot of really good videos."
Garage has endured for 40 years, and Gassen has no fear that the genre will go the way of disco. In fact, he thinks the underground garage genre will only keep getting better.
"This is going to be a very interesting couple of years," he said. "The music industry has no idea what kids want to hear, and they have no idea what to do. This is when the underground does interesting things."
0 Comments on this story
