As I stumble in bewildered fashion into my musical dotage, I frequently find myself rediscovering pockets of my collection that I had completely forgotten about. If you skip neatly over the underlying regrets and worries of music neglected, tossing a rueful smile over your shoulder, it’s not such a disagreeable experience.
This is particularly true of the cavernous landfill of garage punk collections that I’ve built up over the years. A lot of these have titles that riff unashamedly on the original Nuggets collection and eventual series, and the greatest of these was of course Pebbles, which I’ve talked about before.
A glance at Wikipedia tells me that the Pebbles series extends to a scarcely creditable 27 volumes but back in the day I really only remember four records, including the “Acid Gallery” one (Number 3) which I loved at the time but you’d have to say is not one of the best and certainly no match for Vol 2 that I was writing about a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway, something for your Sunday here, hidden away in Vol 5 and recently rediscovered, is this textbook garage classic.
The Dirty Wurds
The Dirty Wurds were from Chicago and released this utter belter in 1965 or 1966 or 1967 depending on which account you read. Perhaps surprisingly, there were a couple of follow ups, also discoverable on YouTube, which suggest that they were actually quite a decent R’n’B band who might have gone on to gather together enough stuff for a pretty good LP, if things had turned out differently. (“Why?”)
None of their other songs were quite like this, mind.
It’s magnificent, a garage punk gold medallist, starting as it does with one of those Byrds-y, jangly chord progressions that can’t have taken long to master but is absolutely exemplary for the time. What really give the record its rusty lustre, however, are Mick Mackles … erm… spirited vocals:
The backing vocals are as sympathetic as the guitar, there’s some tantalising lead work there too, but all of this is overwhelmed by Mackles’ extraordinarily blunt performance. He meanders up to you in overfamiliar (possibly drunken) fashion, occupies your space and bellows this vocal into your face. He is the DP Gumby of boy-girl relationships, perpetually confused by the complexities of the sixties dating game, unable to fathom why, inexplicably, his woman has left him.
We’ve all been there, and we’ve all stood next to him at parties, looking vaguely around for support. You’ve just got to let him blow himself out, though, and disappointingly he does just that after only 2 minutes 19 seconds, an all too brief storm in an incomprehensible teacup.
“Why won’t you come back, baby? I wanna know why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”
I can’t imagine… it’s a puzzler…
Partly Porpoise 