Teenage Shutdown #1: Jump, Jive and Harmonize

by

Various Artists

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should construct a giant garage-shaped granite monument with the names of every group that ever decided to back Dad's Impala out and drag the amps in; The Tomb of the Unknown Garage Band, if you will.

The '60s were rife with do-it-yourself regional garage bands, snarling and whomping and sometimes even recording. We must never forget those brave Beatle-booted souls, whose only mission in life was to make a lot of noise and get a lot of girls.

Thankfully, a large sampling of these "pounding, pulverizing, all-out punk dance ravers" are captured in all their scratchy glory on the Teenage Shutdown series of CD's and vinyl(!). And Jump, Jive and Harmonize is the bossest of a boss bunch. The group names and the titles are provocative: The Us Four - "The Alligator," The Groupies - "Hog," The Shandells - "Gorilla," and every number lives up to its promise with a crunchy screaming three-chord wallop.

The compilers have even researched the artists: a monumental undertaking to be sure, given that these were local bands on tiny regional labels with names like Renco, Empire, GlenValley, and my favorite, Pa-Go-Go. J, J & H spans the years '64 to '67 - a time when recycling the "Louie Louie" riff was a noble undertaking. It was that precious moment in history before everything got all psychedelic and overbearing and just plain SERIOUS. Pop in this CD and smell the fumes.

A great collection of gritty garage tunes. All tunes sound like they were cleaned up from vinyl records. Not bad, but not terrific either. Probably the only place you will find these obscure songs. Wish the master tapes could have been found with Little Walter & Bill Inglot doing the remastering, but alas, 'tis not to be. Evidently the songs were pressed by extremely small record labels and very little detective work or money must have been spent looking for the masters to these tracks. The liner notes give a nice bio of the bands with pix of the original 45's sprinkled throughout. Rather than a booklet though, the notes are in a fold out poster form. All tracks on this disc are mono, NO STEREO HERE!!! Still, this is GREAT GARAGE ROCK and meant to be played CRANKED UP!