Photo courtesy of The Monks


Reissued recently on Light in the Attic Records, The Monks' Black Monk Time may be best appreciated in hindsight. Politics aside, the musical mavericks blazed a trail, in part, fueled by modern-day branding discipline and girl-crazy lyrics.   BY SETH WATTER


Did Lester Bangs ever listen to The Monks? Probably not; otherwise, their surly proto-punk primitivism would have propelled that venerable critic to the same heights scaled by his ecstatic reviews of The Troggs, The Fugs, Count Five, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and what-have-you. It would have been one of his best articles. One can imagine him extolling the virtues of the musical amateur, the productive capacity of rage and frustration, and the innate tastelessness of rock’n’roll. Back when he was drawing attention to The Godz’s Contact High for Creem in 1972, Bangs wrote:

Living in an era when the promise of The Yardbirds had melted away into the operatic bombast of Led Zeppelin, Bangs was always looking back to his youth in 1966 for moral and spiritual nectar. “Wild Thing”, “96 Tears”, “Satisfaction”, and “Louie Louie” were not classed as art, and that was the way Bangs liked it. Rather, they seemed like the spontaneous eruptions of a half-breed folk culture; they might as well have been illiterate, or psychotics. Either one quality or the other, or both, would only aid this music which gave primal expression to the baser instincts: hedonism, venality, thrill-seeking, crime. As The Troggs put it: “The more I have, the more I want.” And the “want” could be summed up in three words: “Girls! Girls! Girls!”

All this by way of saying that The Monks would fit quite neatly into this (willful) philistine’s pantheon. For every serious-minded “Monk Time” or “Complication” on their album, there are two “Drunken Maria”s or “That’s My Girl”s to settle the balance. “Boys are boys and girls are joys,” cajoles one tune; “Hey fella whatcha doin’ with that girl there? Oh that’s a nice girl you’ve got, she sure looks good, I bet you’re gonna make love with her arent’cha?” rambles another. Irony in rock’n’roll? I think a more honest answer would be adherence to tradition. Anyhow, more often than not, parody lets loose with unparalleled fury the demons it set out to satirize—which is what made Rabelais such jolly good reading for both libertines and humanists. A man cannot imitate without simultaneously debasing himself in the process; quoth Plato.

Perhaps, the political bite of The Monks’ music is too often overstated. The tag lines that inevitably accompany their sole 1966 release, Black Monk Time, are no doubt accurate, but they tend to crumble with further investigation. It seems natural that a band of five American GIs stationed in Germany between 1961 and 1966 should make music that is angry, militant, and blatantly opposed to the conflict in Vietnam. We have the image of men so horrified by the atrocities of warfare that they have seceded from society, donned hooded cloaks and shaved their skulls into monks’ tonsures as martyrs of pacifism. Their theme song—“Monk Time”—opens their LP with a quasi-manifesto of intent: “Let’s go, it’s beat time, it’s hop time, it’s Monk Time! You know we don’t like the army, what army, who cares what army? Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?! Mad Vietcong! My brother died in Vietnam!” screams lead singer/guitarist Gary Burger. Famous words! The music is propelled by the pounding, rigid beat of Roger Johnston’s drums, Eddie Shaw’s minimalist bass line, one fervently strummed chord of the late Dave Day’s electric banjo, and Larry Clark’s frenetic organ runs that crackle through the air like grapeshot. Eschewing the beautiful harmonies of the Beatles or the sexpot swagger of the Stones, the group unloads a repetitive chorus—“It’s Monk Time”—in monotone unison. This is radical, avant-garde caveman rock made by musical extremists, nay, musical terrorists, who want to launch the beat into a distant future while retaining the austerity of so many monastics chanting Te Deum. But Abbé Sieyès taught us long ago that the clerical life is not incompatible with violence—cf. his famous quote of 1799: “I seek a sword.”

Here, then, is a group shrouded in mystery—something of a novelty, but a novelty carried into what appears to be a way of life, a veritable philosophy: “You think like I think, you’re a monk, I’m a monk, we’re all monks.” It must have resonated with a divided Germany still suffering the wounds of combat; it was niche music nonetheless. Indeed, their album was unavailable for many years outside its country of origin, and, despite television appearances, proved a complete flop, probably hastening the group’s disbanding in 1967 and their quick fade to obscurity. But Black Monk Time endured among collectors as a cult item, its vision unleashed half a decade too soon. The hypnotic, droning avant-gardism would go on to influence krautrock; the anger and primitivism, punk rock.

In the past ten years, The Monks have had more attention than any time since their Hamburg heyday: numerous reissues, a reunion gig at Cavestomp in 1999, and the German documentary, The Transatlantic Feedback (Palacious & Post, 2006)  (see video clip below). While it has finally cemented their reputation as pioneers, it has also done much to harm them by laying bare all the threading within the garment. Watching the aforementioned film, it becomes quickly apparent that The Monks paved the way for The Sex Pistols in more than one sense; their revolutionary image was just as much a product of clever manufacturing and opportunism on the part of managers as Rotten’s was a product of Malcolm McLaren’s imagination.

Who knew that before The Monks emerged qua Monks they were a dime-a-dozen Brit invasion cover band called The Torquays? That they donned the cassocks and tonsures only after entering a project engineered by former design students-turned-admen Karl-H. Remy and Walther Niemann? That after breaking up and returning to America, they took jobs at IBM and local churches, started families and lived in the suburbs? That they were all pretty conservative fellas who liked girls and Elvis and having a good time? That they often felt guilty inflicting their music on an unsuspecting public? That they didn’t despise the army as their lyrics suggested, but sympathized with their countrymen in Vietnam? (For instance: taking offense to the anti-war lyrics of “Monk Time” forced upon them by their managers, Eddie Shaw found a compromise by appending the note that the Vietcong were, in fact, “mad”.)

Most would prefer to the remember The Monks as they appeared onstage: wound-up springs of coiled energy, beaming smiles, feeling the music with herky-jerk motions, and with obsessional devotion to image.  All in all, it hurts to have one’s dreams shattered by the tawdry reality of the whole affair; only Gary Burger seems to attach much significance to the band’s revolutionary appeal.  Where the critic so much wants to see the mark of genius at work, he must ultimately acknowledge the slick product of German industry.

Like I said: we shouldn’t put too much stock in the group’s politics, which are really quite superficial. When all is said done, maybe three Monks songs truly contain that brand of critical appeal: the eponymous “Monk Time”, the bang-bang-bang militancy of “Shut Up” with its accusations of all-pervasive lying, and the feedback-drenched “Complication” whose grievances are addressed directly to the U.S. government: “People cry, people die, people kill for you.”

Whether or not their music is politically correct is
a question best left unanswered.

What The Monks accomplished, in collaboration with their German conceptualist peers, was the laying bare of the rock’n’roll edifice in the form of an “anti-Beatles.” The covert violence and masculine aggression of rock is amped up to new levels of crudity; sexual frustration is turned into loathing, and woman is just as much the enemy as Vietnam. “Oh I hate you with a passion baby! Well you know my hate’s everlasting baby,” croons Burger with his uniquely hoarse, elastic delivery. “But call me,” chant his Monks peers in the background. Set against a dirge-like bass and a one-two-one-two rhythm that stomp the listener like the footfalls of boots on pavement, it’s one of the best jokes perpetrated in rock history. By yoking together tenderness toward the opposite sex and the vitriol so often underpinning it in an emerging women’s lib era, The Monks turned the genre’s conventions on their head by reveling in its hypocrisy. Whether or not their music is politically correct is a question best left unanswered.


Popular music has always had this passion for
nonsense—were “Tutti Frutti” or “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”
about anything or anyone in particular?

Yes, The Monks were girl-crazy: whether it be a sweet ditty like “That’s My Girl”, dealing with sexual jealousy of another man’s bird, or a mutant polka such as “Drunken Maria”, seemingly about trying to keep an intoxicated woman on her feet in a state of wakefulness. Often the lyrics are so concise that it’s hard to tell if a song has any content at all. Several numbers manage to stay at ten words or less, ie. “Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy”, “We Do Wie Du”, and “Blast Off”. They are exercises in the purity of rhythm and repetition, the lyrics serving as nothing but mantras in a spiraling St. Vitus’ Dance of guitar, bass, drums, organ, and banjo. Remy and Niemann wanted the group to pare their textual excursions down to the most fundamental, telegraphic speech: what was the least one could say while still communicating at all? Popular music has always had this passion for nonsense—were “Tutti Frutti” or “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” about anything or anyone in particular? Rhyme is divorced from reason; it sets out on its own path as a way to loosen the tongue and, with it, mind and body as constricting entities. It doesn’t just revel in the pleasures of the flesh, it is the flesh.

They came from American rock’n’roll, and, despite all meddling, rock is where they stayed. Even the organ, the most radical element of their sound, was popularized in the same year by Question Mark and the Mysterians’ insistently minimal farfisa. Which is why I think Bangs would have liked The Monks; while other groups deconstructed rock by allowing it to deteriorate into arrhythmic squawk, they stripped it to basics with an unerring devotion to form. Is it hard to strum one banjo chord over and over again, harder or softer as the rhythm demands? No; so why don’t more people do it? I’ve always liked Bangs’ answer: “Most people are too stupid! They’d rather go learn Eric Clapton riffs.” Lyrically, much of the serious protest music dating from The Monks’ era seems dated and stale today—we may be lucky their politics didn’t extend far beyond fighting for a nice pair of legs. No one will ever call their album a time capsule. And what is really most remarkable is how such a dearth of musical substance still proves so fascinating and inexhaustible over forty years later; as Dave Day put it, the managers were geniuses to think so far ahead.


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