The Best Garage Rock Albums of the '60s

Tacoma, Washington, one microphone hung over the drums, and an engineer who by most accounts spent the session begging Gerry Roslie to stop screaming directly into the equipment. 'Strychnine' is a song about drinking poison for fun, delivered like a man who means it. Everything here is recorded far too hot, and that accident became the template for decades of loud music.

Five American GIs stationed in West Germany who mustered out, stayed put, shaved actual tonsures into their heads, wore nooses instead of neckties and played electric banjo. 'Monk Time' opens with a spoken introduction about Vietnam that no American label would have pressed. Polydor released it in Germany alone. Nobody bought it. Everyone who found it later started a band.

Roky Erickson howling over Tommy Hall's amplified jug — a genuine ceramic jug, blown into a microphone, audible across the whole record. 'You're Gonna Miss Me' is the one that escaped onto radio. A streaming note: the only edition preserving the original running order is filed as the QFPS Version, so every track title carries that suffix.

Sky Saxon's band cut this in a handful of days for GNP Crescendo, with keyboard player Daryl Hooper covering the bass parts on a Wurlitzer because there was nobody else to do it. 'Pushin' Too Hard' is two chords and a sneer and it has not aged a day. Streaming warning: the only edition appends eight later tracks and drops one original.

A Los Angeles band who had been playing hotel lounges and Disneyland, handed a song about Boston written by their producer Ed Cobb after he got mugged there. None of them were from Boston. 'Dirty Water' now plays at Fenway Park after every home win, a strange fate for a cynical studio job. Only the expanded edition streams.

Rudy Martinez legally changed his name to a question mark, claimed to have arrived from Mars and has worn sunglasses indoors for sixty years since. The Vox organ riff on '96 Tears' was played by Frank Rodriguez, who was fifteen at the time. Note the sequencing on the streaming edition: the title track sits last rather than first.

Their second Etiquette LP, made exactly the way the first was because nobody involved could see a reason to change anything that worked. 'He's Waitin'' is the Roslie original that matches the debut's best, a warning song delivered at maximum volume. Streaming titles it 'The Sonics Boom', matching the sleeve, and dates the reissue to 2013.

Sean Bonniwell dressed the band entirely in black, dyed everyone's hair to match and had each man wear a single black glove, a good decade before anyone else thought of that. 'Talk Talk' runs under two minutes and says everything it needs to. The rest is covers, competently done, but those opening minutes are why the record matters.

The backwards, tremolo-drenched guitar that opens 'I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)' came out of a happy studio accident involving a tape running the wrong way while the band packed up. Dave Hassinger produced. Most of the songs arrived from outside writers, the standard 1967 arrangement, and the group spent decades being audibly annoyed about it.

A San Jose band whose producer, Ed Cobb again, kept swapping their singer's vocals for a session man's without mentioning it, then padded the LP with studio instrumentals the band had never played. 'Let's Talk About Girls' survived all that interference and remains a brilliant piece of snotty Rolling Stones worship. Their own account of the sessions is worth hunting down.

Dick Taylor left the Rolling Stones before they were the Rolling Stones and formed this instead, with Phil May growing the longest hair in Britain and generating actual newspaper columns about it. 'Rosalyn' is faster and nastier than anything his old band cut that year. The streaming edition runs eighteen tracks; the original Fontana LP held twelve.

A nineteen-year-old Van Morrison fronting a Belfast R&B group, recording alongside session players brought in because Decca did not trust the band to play its own parts. 'Mystic Eyes' began as a jam the tape happened to catch and was edited down to two minutes of harmonica and menace. 'Gloria' is on here too, obviously.

Five teenagers from San Jose who performed in Dracula capes, wrote one perfect song and then turned down touring money to finish college, a decision Lester Bangs spun into an essay now more famous than the band. 'Psychotic Reaction' borrows the Yardbirds' rave-up wholesale and arguably improves on it. The remainder is roughly what you would expect.

A Chicago band who took Them's song, cleaned up one line so American radio would touch it, and landed the hit Van Morrison never got. 'Gloria' as they cut it is cruder and, if we are being honest with each other, more fun. Their pitch was British blues with a Midwestern accent, and for one year that was plenty.

Barry Tashian's Boston group opened for the Beatles on that final American tour, then broke up before their own album had a chance to chart anywhere. 'Don't Look Back' is a Smokey Robinson tune rebuilt into something anxious and driving. The streaming version runs twenty tracks against an original twelve, the loosest edition on this list.

Reg Presley was a bricklayer from Andover, and 'Wild Thing' was cut in well under an hour on studio time left over from somebody else's session. The ocarina solo happened because a man had one in his pocket. The debut is padded, sixteen tracks on streaming against twelve originally, but nothing has ever sounded more like three chords played correctly.

A Bronx band who wore suits wired with battery-powered lights on stage and who got the word psychedelic onto a record sleeve months before anybody else managed it. '(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet' rides a bassline borrowed from Ricky Nelson and went top five in America. Their reading of Tobacco Road sprawls out past seven minutes.

Minneapolis, a tiny local label called Warick, and a band who covered the Who, Cream and the Small Faces on one record without embarrassing themselves once. 'Action Woman' is their own, and the fuzz tone on it is genuinely startling — it sounds like an amplifier in the process of failing. Almost nobody outside Minnesota heard this until collectors found it.