Updated Again - What is Garage Rock? Proto-Punk? Power Pop? Freakbeat?

One of the biggest challenges this blog is going face is to cater for both someone who may remember the first wave of garage rock and the newbie who just heard the Strokes on an oldies weekend on the local so-called "alternative" station and wants to learn more about the music that came to be called garage rock. So newbies -- welcome to Garage Rock 101. There will be a quiz every Friday, but it's always open notes and there'll be free online tutoring here. For those of you already in the know, it's your job to pull the newbies (and sometimes, myself) up to your level of knowledge.

For some of you, the first question you might ask is “so what is garage rock anyway?”

Great question. Glad I asked.

Trying to define any genre of music is always a little dicey. Quick – define Jazz. Then, if that's easy, then deal with all the people who want to jump down your throat because you didn't define it the way they did, or maybe because you decided Dean Martin was jazz and Mr. Miles Davis devotee is having an aneurysm that you said that.

But I digress ...

The definition of garage rock, at least according to your humble narrator here, is that it’s a subgenre of rock and roll that features simple but catchy guitar licks, uptempo beats, frequently a keyboard, that often being really cheesy organs, and sometimes some rudimentary blues harmonica. The instrumentation and  production are often deliberately amateurish. Nearly all garage rock is tied together by a sound strongly reminiscent of early-to-mid-60’s rock and roll with a heavy nod to first wave British bands.

Generally, garage rock would not be considered high art, so if your ideal of rock and roll is Dream Theater, you may be in the wrong place (not that they're not incredible -- it's just that this is the opposite end of the spectrum here).

Paul Revere and the Raiders

Syndicate of Sound

It’s mostly just for the good times. The lyrics are almost always girls (or boys), cars and Saturday night. Garage rock almost never makes social statements, although once in a while there’ll be an anti-racism or anti-war song. In general, it’s happy music made for good times, or moping after your girl just dumped you.




But, there is one overriding requirement: The people singing it actually have to seem like they actually like the song, as complex or primitive (mostly the latter) it may be. Sure, that sounds like a "no duh." But part of our founding credo at this blog is that mainstream rock has become, by and large, joyless, contrived and totally, massively and completely predictable.

On this blog, we celebrate strains of rock and roll which have been, and still are, joyful and loaded with passion and fun. We don't care if the songs are huge hits. We don't care if the artists were or are fixtures on the pop charts. Platinum records are fine, but that's not what we admire most.

What we admire is music that makes us feel alive.

Garage Rock has a few strains that often criss-cross. Most commonly, it’s sound is decidedly pop,  strongly echoing the Beatles and other first-wave British Invasion bands. Examples would include Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Premiers, Syndicate of Sound, and maybe some more psychedelic-leaning bands like the Seeds and the Chocolate Watchband. A band very adept at this school of garage rock was the Gants. You can check out our feature on the Gants here and here.

The New Trocaderos

This sound never died completely died, and I'll be shocked if it ever does. Many modern bands continue that tradition. Off the top of my head, good examples would include The New Trocaderos, The Len Price 3, The Satelliters, The Cocktail Slippers and many others whom I probably shouldn’t be forgiven for forgetting, continue this sound.

Another strain of Garage Rock, perhaps a little less common these days are bands that play almost straight-up blues. Songs often sound suspiciously like Slim Harpo rewrites (and if you don’t know who Slim Harpo is, you need to look him up!).  These bands probably look more to the Yardbirds or the Rolling Stones than the Beatles for inspiration. Best examples: really early Captain Beefheart; Barrance Whitfield and the Savages (or Whitfield by himself).

A third discernible style is harder edged, darker themed and a direct forerunner to punk rock. The guitars are more distorted and the beats are more aggressive, though not quite angry. The songs can be happy, but tend more towards melancholia. Some bands in the original wave of this include some of Garage Rock's most legendary – and still – popular groups like The Music Machine, The Standells, The Barbarians and the Rationals to name just a few. Scandinavia is very good at producing bands with this sound, with groups like The Dogs from Norway and The Nomads from Sweden.

Los Saicos

But wait, there's more.

Another strain would be so-called "blue-eyed soul." Rock and roll has always looked to the African-American community for inspirations -- heck, rock and roll started off pretty much as African-American music -- and garage rock is no exception. Bands like the Jesters gave their props to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but their hearts -- and sound -- often owed as much to Motown and Otis Redding as to anybody from the UK.

Yet another branch of the garage rock tree points to its immediate successor -- psychedelia. Garage bands like the aforementioned Seeds, as well as Southwest F.O.B were already using trippy keyboard lines, making the boundaries between garage and psychedelia, well, quite fuzzy. This tradition has continued today with bands like the Fuzztones and the Lords of Altamount.

Garage Rock is worldwide; I may be wrong about this but garage rock seems to be a bit more respected in Europe, particularly Scandinavia,  than in North America (check out our feature story about the Norwegian band the Dogs) . That said, there are plenty of great bands from both sides of the puddle. South America has contributed no small number of bands and good songs, such as the Peruvian band Los Saicos and at various points in their career, the quietly seminal Brazilian band Os Mutatntes. The Fathers of Rock en Espanol, Argentina's Soda Stereo, were also, at least for a while, garage rockers.

The name of the blog is GarageRockTopia, but it's not all Garage Rock. 

The other genres to which this blog is devoted to are Proto-punk and power pop, in some ways are easier to define and some ways tougher. That said, who exactly is power-pop or Proto-punk and who’s punk or garage is always a source of argument to music geeks.

Proto-punk is exactly what it implies – much harder driving music, perhaps not quite as innocent as garage but still not as politically or emotionally charged as punk, and most of these groups predate The Ramones, whom in my opinion, are the first true punk band. Protopunk took a much darker turn than Garage. It was garage rock with the amps turned up and the innocence shut off.

If you look up Proto-Punk in the dictionary, you'll probably see a picture of Iggy Pop and/or the Stooges. You could also point to other Michigan band, such as (more infamously) the MC5 and the until-recently unknown band called Death. New York bands The Dictators,  and The New York Dolls also come immediately to mind, though some might argue they're already punk.

To this blogger, protopunk picks up about the time and place garage ends. Most obervers would place the garage rock era from about 1964 to 1968 or 1969. By then, Psychedelia and so-called "Acid Rock" became the thing. And lo and behold, right about that same time came along the bands whom most fans would agree are protopunk.

The MC5 didn't deliberately give the finger to the hippie movement, but as proud radicals, they were beyond the peace and love thing. The Stooges were more deliberate in their rejection of flower power, exploring the darker side of their generation. The Velvet Underground beat them to it, but where Lou Reed and company were more artistic and cerebral, the Stooges were raw dog, in your face power rock.
Many of the founders of punk have declared the Stooges their stylistic godfathers.

The Raspberries

Power Pop might be the hardest to identify, but also the most accessible (Pop. Duh!) Closely related to Garage Rock, it also features uptempo beats and upbeat lyrics. Power Pop is usually a lot more professionally produced than Garage and artists aren't afraid to show off how good they really are. Once in a while, Power Pop songs become hits or later become standards. Best example? In my mind, the obvious answer is “What I Like About You” by the Romantics. But there were some truly great bands whom deserve your attention, including the Raspberries and the Shoes.

Freakbeat will also be part of the mix here. Freakbeat is a little tricky to define exactly and maybe isn't really a style per se. Freakbeat generally refers to the British bands of the early and mid-'60s who mostly stayed home during British Invasion and had small to medium followings in England.

John's Children

The music is frequently a bit rougher than the more well-known bands, though that doesn't mean they weren't as talented. In fact, no small number of British rock legends were in Freakbeat bands before becoming well known. Pre T. Rex, Marc Bolan plied his trade with the band John's Children; Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood, long before there was an Electric Light Orchestra, were part of the Move. One bloke with a Freakbeat band was Davy Jones, who later found his weird but brilliant side and became David Bowie.

Others would broaden the definition to include very well-known bands such as the Who. Others, such as Pink Floyd, were easily under the Freakbeat umbrella but became gigantic. For the purposes of this blog, we'll focus on those bands who didn't get their day in the sun stateside but probably very much deserved to.

The logical starting point for anyone still not sure what Freakbeat is all about should check out the second Nuggets compilation, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969. Released in 2001, this wonderful boxed set showcases many bands that were largely unknown on this side of the puddle. The set also includes bands from points as widespread as Australia, Japan and Uruguay, the set gives a great overview of what Freakbeat was all about.

For the purposes of this blog, we'll keep the spotlight on the bands that aren't so well-known, though our first foray into British rock is with the great band the Pretty Things. 


There are plenty of other subgenres that are certainly worthy of being on this blog, that are closely related are are often liked by devotees of Garage Rock. To be honest, I simply don't have the time to give them the effort they are worthy of. That said, they are in no way 86'd from this blog.Surf, at least instrumentally, is very similar to Garage Rock but almost never has vocals. I’m not talking about the Beach Boys, but more the instrumental variety that emerged in the early '60s and like garage, never completely went away. Bands like the Ventures, Dick Dale and the Surfaris retain a loyal following and continue to have some influence.  In my mind, if you can't dig "Apache" by the Shadows, then you truly have a hole in your soul.

There is a subgenre called GaragePunk, which has many of the the same features as Garage Rock but tends to be far more aggressive both vocally and instrumentally. I consider this more a subset of punk than garage. Still, if you check this out further it’s hard to imagine not finding some stuff you’ll really like.

All of these subgenres have common threads running through them. As that first wave of garage rock or morphed into psychedelia.  while we think psychedelia was groovey and all, it didn't quite have the raw primal energy that garage had, and in this blogger's humble opinion, that's what paved the way for protopunk. Iggy Pop and others have said in so many words that they weren't all about the peace and love. Iggy, a failed blues drummer, channeled that energy, and, dismissing the flower child mentality, probably created punk rock. If he didn't do it, the MC5 -- part of the radical politics going on in Detroit -- did. Whichever way you slice it, garage rock's energy was reborn.

All of the genres we write about here, though, have one important thing in common -- passion. Garage rock has that youthful passion of young people figuring out the world -- and all its pitfalls and blessings. Some of those same people, now PO'd, kept that passion in protopunk. Later, some of them spiffed it up just a bit but kept that joy and brought us power pop.

And the reason people still care about this music decades after it first appeared is because that passion shines through in contrast to today's tepid, milquetoast, contrived, phonied up, gimmicked up world of mainstream rock and pop. Here, we celebrate not the rock music that makes you want to jump off a building (or maybe, just fall asleep), but the music that actually makes you glad you're alive.

That’s about all for now, but inclosing I want to say something. This site will be a POSITIVE blog. If you are looking for a blog that gripes about Hip Hop or goes on and on about how much One Direction or Taylor Swift suck, please find another blog. First off, I do actually like some Hip Hop and though I can't say the same for the two aforementioned music acts, there's just no point in wasting my time and energy saying stuff that probably gets tweeted a million times a day.

More importantly, though, I really don't understand this idea that to build up what you like you have to tear down what you don't like. Here's a tip: If you don't like something, DON'T PAY ANY NEVERMIND TO IT. I think the music I’m writing about is so awesome and I love it so much that I don’t have to put other stuff down to build up what I like. Either you like it or you don't. I hope you do, though.

Also, I won’t say this is a G-rated blog simply because “G” is generally a kiss of death, so it’s “PG.”  It’s only “PG” because a lot of this will go over the heads of young children. But you know what? If you like cool music, and you want to have a place to read about it, this blog is for you, whether you’re 65 or 6. Welcome!

Last thing: Are you in a garage band? Are you involved in the music somehow? Do you have a record label? I'd love to talk to you and maybe feature you in a story here on Garagerocktopia. Please leave a comment. My next few posts will be informational but I want to start writing feature stories and print more interviews.

Catch you next week! -- RK