AA.VV.
Be A Caveman

Many of you have contacted me privately during these dark and stormy months, imploring me to bring light back to these shores and to spread the knowledge of garage punk among the vulgar masses.

Despite the proverbial shyness and innate modesty that distinguish me, despite avoiding being a hero for the indecisive and a star for those in need of guidance, I have found that garage punk is rather absent on these pages, so …

So get «Be A Caveman – The Best Of The Voxx Garage Revival»!

Do you think the garage is that rundown place where you stuff your junk? Have you lost the meaning of Voxx in the mists of time, and are already desperately searching for your tattered copy of “THE”? The names Greg Shaw and Shelley Ganz don’t sound familiar to you at all?

It’s simple, you’re ignorant; but there is a remedy for everything and «Be A Caveman» is what you need.

There was a time – the late seventies, more or less – when bad music sprouted everywhere and not even the punk movement managed to clean it up: artificial, synthetic, and plasticky sounds endured like weeds resisting the ddt and made their way, misleading young minds.

But in those same times, some resisted and covertly planned the counteroffensive: DMZ, Chesterfield Kings, Crawdaddys were the heroes of those times and a certain Greg Shaw built an impregnable stronghold for them. That stronghold was Voxx.

In 1979 the Crawdaddys mustered up the courage and showed the world grim faces, long hair, and their siblings’ outdated rejected clothes.

With them, they had only second-hand guitars, basses, drums, and keyboards, sold cheaply in the rare local shops.

Second-hand was also the music they played, learned from listening to certain 45s that had long been forgotten on the shelves of a disco gathering dust and therefore caught their attention, besides the peculiar names of the authors: Chocolate Watchband, Electric Prunes, Marshmallow Overcoat ignited more imagination and inspiration than gasoline thrown on a fire.

Derivative music, without a doubt.

But those were also the years of punk. And despite many punks spitting on the past, the Voxx guys exercised wisdom (???) and concluded that if they continued to spit, sooner or later they would find themselves spitting against the wind and the spits would return to them with much greater virulence: in simple terms, they understood that in the grooves of «Nuggets» – one of those dusty records they had taken up again – there was as much punk as there was in the improbable anthems of Dead Boys and Pagans, that’s all.

The Crawdaddys were the first to come out into the open and with them, the Voxx emerged: it was 1979, the year of «Crawdaddy’s Express», and that was the first lp on which the Voxx brand was stamped. On the cover, the musicians were portrayed climbing an old locomotive; the music that came out of the grooves ran as fast as a steam train.

The gates of the stronghold were flung open.

Many wonderful people passed through, after the Crawdaddys.

The DMZ and the Chesterfield Kings, obviously; the Barracudas and Plan 9; the Unclaimed and Gravedigger V; the Tell-Tale Hearts and the Miracle Workers; and even the Fuzztones and the Pandoras.

No one would have bet a broken dollar on those reckless people but, against all logic, they chipped a deep breach in the wall of artificial, synthetic, and plasticky music then reigning and even today they are deservedly celebrated as the heroes of an era, brief but really intense for emotions and passions.

Alongside them, many other heroes of equal value, albeit of lesser fame.

So, beware of forgetting the Vertebrats and «Left In The Dark», and they were not forgotten by the Replacements who worthily covered “Left In The Dark”; the Bostonians Time Beings and Odds, the latter enthusiastically punking the Shadows Of Knight; the Surf Trio, who played surf like the Ramones; the great Vipers, who instead played as the Beatles would have sounded if they had barricaded themselves in the stronghold with the others; the Cynics; the Swedish Stomachmouths, who shouted along with the Nomads that in Sweden there were not only Abba; the Hypstrz, who had a less pronounceable name than a tax code, and made only one record (live to boot) which was pure dynamite, almost all covers, including a devastating «In The Midnight Hour».

And then again Wombats, Laughing Soup Dish, Eyes of Mind, Things, Leopards, Event and the exceptional Steppes: they played Merseybeat, garage-punk, psychedelia; some managed to release an lp, some a single, someone didn’t publish anything and their own composition was published for the first time right in «Be A Caveman».

All these heroes have now retreated into the stronghold, leaving the forefront to others:

today’s is no longer the rattling late seventies/early eighties garage-punk revival and it is better this way, because that was an unrepeatable season.

If you’ve come this far, it means you had time to waste. I only hope I managed to convey to you an infinitesimal dose of the passion that these notes exude; otherwise, whoever wants to grasp the overwhelming force of the garage-punk revival, spends an extra minute listening to «Be A Caveman» the song by the Dwarves that titles and closes this beautiful collection, because it is certainly much more eloquent than all the words I have spent so far.

The Dwarves barred the door; the Voxx stronghold was and is impregnable.