The Hypstrz - 6654321 - 1979 HYPSTRZ – Live at The Longhorn (Bomp!)
They weren't the best. But certainly among the first.
The Hypstrz were born in Minneapolis from the mutation of King Kustom & The Cruisers, a rockabilly band that frequented the city’s clubs. But in 1976, they decided to shift their focus towards the darker Sixties.
In fact, they are not alone. Because there’s another band in town that loves to mix old tracks by Love and MC5 into their punk trash. They are called Suicide Commandos. They are the true pioneers of the city.
However, the Hypstrz go further. They are a cover band, although they also try to write three or four original songs (I Don’t, This Had Gotta Be a Joke, Only a Matter of Time, Silverspoonpunkthunk) and include them in their setlist during concerts. The Hypstrz are thus the first to recognize the potential of songs like Talk Talk, Come See Me, Can’t Stand the Pain, Riot On Sunset Strip, Action Woman, You’re Gonna Miss Me, Surfin’ Bird, Little Girl, Don’t Look Back, and to believe in the eternal power of old soul music classics like Hold On, I’m Coming, In the Midnight Hour, Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, and I’ll Go Crazy.
In the heart of the punk era, the Hypstrz do everything themselves.
They listen, learn, play, and self-produce a 45 RPM record to sell at concerts and present to the few who might be interested. And in 1979, if you’re playing songs by the Pretty Things and the Flamin’ Groovies, you can’t skip letting Greg Shaw know.
Greg agrees to distribute their 45 RPM and suggests the band record a whole live album documenting that weekend at Jay‘s Longhorn from which they extracted the four tracks for the EP.
The Hypstrz album is released in 1980 under the title Hypstrization!: fifteen tracks taken from those two nights of April 14 and 15, 1979, recorded by Paul Stark. To listen to the remaining fifteen tracks, it will take another twenty-five years and the release of this Live at The Longhorn, which thus lines up 34 songs from that period with the addition of three tracks performed during the reunion the previous year: The Witch by the Sonics, 7 & 7 Is by Love, Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl by the Barbarians. A fundamental historical document despite, as noted at the beginning, the Hypstrz's approach is not the absolutely vintage one of the Crawdaddys nor the heavily punk-infected style of DMZ (despite the punk influence being evident in the native tracks, particularly in the Silverspoonpunkthunk written by bassist Randy Weiss, NdLYS), to stay within the same historical era. The sound of the Hypstrz is impure, informal, not very faithful to the orthodoxy of the garage bands that would come a few years later, closer to certain power-pop excesses burning through the American underground at that time. An album entirely negligible after the deluge of revival bands that soon overwhelmed America, but necessary for immortalizing.
