Best recorded moments of the mangy bitch’s entire career were things like “Light Is Faster than Sound,” a song about speed, a topic more recently exploited by limey hatemongers like the Clash, featuring an utterly tasteless and mindlessly manic guitar solo. Or check out the se­cond song on side two of Cheap Thrills, which I cannot remember the title of, but the splo within its parameters is equally derailed, so much so that it has been suggested to me before by my listening buddies that Gurley must’ve been listening to the Velvets’ stuff like “I Heard Her Call My Name.” I don’t believe that—I just think it was a case of the cosmic parallelism so endemic to the Sixties: Gurley and Lou just both happened to be guys who didn’t know how to play their guitars in such a way as to elicit “tasty licks” or all that other Traffic twaddle, and were both wirefried straight out of their heads in separate places at the same time.
If I seem unnecessarily harsh on San Francisco it’s not just to dish that town—it’s only that their city’s sounds dominance over prevalent rock tastes of the late Sixties led so directly to the punk backlash. True, they did have great forerunners such as Blue Cheer with their magnificent Vincebus Erup­turn, and even better Mad River, whose first album was one of the all-time classics of musical bone and nerve splinters frying over a gas flame. I can still remember such wonderous careens as “Amphetamine Gazelle,” “High All the Time” (“And no one looks to me/Like they’ve come here/To see my eyes/Which are burnt and blinded” . . . and then the best lines of all: “Clear it away/This grease that’s on my hide ... “A more precise delineation of the feel of caked-in putrefying sweat after four or five days up on meth I’ve never heard.) and “Merciful Monks” (“I could take a broom and sweep the burning nostrils into the sea!”). But Mad River themselves are a case in my point. They got doused so severe­ly for the masterpiece just described that they reverted whole-hog in their second and final LP to nothing less than folkie jams! San Francisco—See how :hou afflictest thy musical servants with shame and lethargy! And shame be upon thy brows for such calumny!
That’s why so many of us were forced to turn away from your Golden Gate at the time. Far away, far as England (although eventually we rerouted to San Jose), where in 1966 a group called the Troggs had come up with a hit in a truly mindless piece of dinosaur rock called “Wild Thing.” This one group so inspired me that in an ancient (1971) issue of the mouldy rock fanzine Who Put the Bomp I wrote a 65 page article about them. The preparation of said composition took 26 straight hours and destroyed my host’s typewriter in the process. It also, of course, rambled out­rageously—a good deal of the piece was about my own high school ex­periences of sexual frustration playing footsie with a little Mexican girl in Math-lA. What does that have to do with the Troggs or punk rock, you ask? Everything, obviously. Since I knew almost next to just about nothing about the Troggs, I just blathered on in the context wherein I assimilated them—the reason I liked them in the first place was that I was a fucked up kid who’d never been laid yet and felt real­ly nihilistic about the world in general and dreamed of being a rock ‘n’ roller so I could take out my pained confu­sion on my guitar. The Troggs were that too, in person (I presume) and certainly in their music. “I’ve lost my girl/I can’t express/My grief/My sorrow/My emp­tiness,” intoned in the most lifelessly mechanical and downright stupid manner possible, followed by a totally tasteless noiserip guitar solo. As for the immortal “Wild Thing,” I almost laugh­ed the first time I heard it. Then I realiz­ed that it was almost within my own power to actually play those two or three dumb chords the song was based on, not to mention thinking up lyrics that inane, and singing as lamely as Reg Presley. At that point, quite understandably, I began to get excited.

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