Five Years Ahead Of My Time: Garage Rock From The 1950s To The Present

Seth Bovey REVERB

Fine and thorough account of the ever-reviving guitar genre.

It’s forgotten now but by 1958, rock’n’roll was considered to be finished, with Little Richard giving up music to enter the ministry and Elvis joining the army. What commentators didn’t reckon with was a vast explosion of young, amateur, makeshift groups across America who would keep the genre alive, buying up instruments in large numbers and dreaming rock’n’roll dreams of their own. When The Beatles conquered America, the same happened

again, this time worldwide – one of the many fascinating details of Bovey’s account is a Uruguayan beat group called Los Mockers, imitation Moptops who took a small portion of South America by storm. After punk, garage entered a postmodern phrase with the brilliant B-52s and Cramps referencing its origins.

Bovey is an academic, but this book is light on theory and copious in historical detail and explanation of the development of a movement that has survived on sheer unquenchable fuzztone enthusiasm.