As the author of an informative-type column like this one, it’s important that I go about my day-to-day activities with the utmost attention to detail. For it is my burden, dear reader, to be making dutiful mental notes upon hearing references to music, especially when said references occur in close proximity to a Web address. And so my ears pricked up and my heart swelled with pride when I heard about garagehangover.com at a social gathering. I fired up my PC and let my fingers do the walking, exploring this fantastic blog. The project is basically a gathering spot for tracks and info on ’60s garage bands, and since the bands either don’t exist anymore, and/or don’t have legal representation, there are an absolute shitload of tracks available for download. You know how the average music blog is putting, like, one or two tracks at the end of the post, ’cause the writer’s a huge pussy and doesn’t want to get in trouble? Well, this guy’s just putting both sides of every 45 he can get his hands on up there. The Web site’s also designed with bad tiled backgrounds and an innocence that screams “someone over 50”—so you can be pretty confident the writer knows his stuff. Some interesting finds:
Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols before Love (www.garagehangover.com/
mp3s/ArthurBryanJohnny/LAGsRumbleStillSkins.mp3), an informative article on the Underworld, It’s All Meat and the Toronto Scene in the late ’60s (www.garagehangover.com/2006B.html#underworld) and the Magic Plants (www.garagehangover.com/mp3s/MagicPlants.mp3).
If you wanted to make a mash-up, and you wanted a lot of people to download and listen to it, you could do a lot worse than choosing Grizzly Bear and the Knife, two of the hottest bands of the moment, as your source material. This is exactly what PARRKA has done, mixing the former’s “The Knife” with the latter’s “Heartbeats” here: www.brooklynvegan.com/mp3/knifeknifexyz.mp3. Rather than simply being a novelty, the results here are surprisingly good, and definitely worth a listen if you like either of these bands.
