Music to scare bullies by

The Monks had tonsures and cowls. Gonn performed beneath a swastika. But both embody the strange and continuing appeal of garage punk. Alexis Petridis reports
Bad habits ... the enduring appeal of the Monks. Photograph: PR

In the late 1980s, Eddie Shaw was at home in Carson City, Nevada, when two strangers knocked on his door, demanding to know if he was the same Eddie Shaw who had played bass in a band called the Monks in Germany in the mid 60s. He was not overjoyed to see them. The Monks had ended their brief and turbulent career in 1967, hitless, broke and, as frontman Gary Berger puts it, "beat to hell". Furthermore, one of the few subsequent conversations Shaw had ever had about the Monks had not gone terribly well: unaware that Shaw had been in the band, a fellow drinker in a bar said that he had seen the Monks live in the 60s and objected strenuously to the band's anti-Vietnam war stance. "He said, 'I wanted to fuckin' kill them! Assholes, they were!' I was saying, 'Oh, that sounds pretty bad, they seem like a bunch of jerks to me.'"

So when the strangers came knocking, says Shaw, "I nearly slammed the door on them. I was cautious, but I let them in." He adds, "They told me people were paying a lot of money for our records, that we had a big fan base. They showed me an article about a band called the Lunachicks. They said they'd discovered this 60s band who dressed as monks, that were a bunch of GIs that went awol from the army. The army was looking for them, they showed up on German TV singing a song called I Hate You, then vanished and no one's ever seen them since. I said, 'Hey, that's a pretty good story.' I liked it better than the truth."

The truth was only marginally less unlikely. The Monks were former GIs, stationed in West Germany, who had been transformed by a German management team from covers band the Torquays into the "anti-Beatles": dressed in cassocks, their heads shaved into tonsures, howling anti-war slogans over a primitive, feedback-riven "deconstructed" brand of rock, in which an amplified banjo figured heavily. They attracted fans playing the clubs along Hamburg's Reeperbahn ("all the bad kids came to see us, all the prostitutes, we were their favourites," Shaw once noted), while a slot on a 1966 TV show impressed at least one watching teenager.

Hans Joachim Irmler, of Krautrock pioneers Faust, later remembered their appearance as "a new freedom ... a positive NO! ... the future", and you can hear something of Krautrock's "motorik" beat in the Monks' tightly wound playing. But for the most part, the reactions ranged from bewilderment to outright hostility. Their album Black Monk Time, recently reissued on CD, flopped. At least splitting when they did got them out of a spectacularly hare-brained plan to go and play live in downtown Saigon. "Retrospect tells me it's probably a damn good thing that we didn't go to Saigon," Berger says. "Clubs were getting blown up in those days. I think we talked about whether or not we'd play songs like Black Monk Time and Complication, the songs that gave the army a bad time. Maybe we wouldn't have. We might still have gotten killed."

If anything, Berger was even more nonplussed than Shaw with the news that the Monks were being hailed as figureheads of garage rock, a musical movement they knew nothing about either at the time or subsequently: "Unwitting," he says, "is definitely the word." While they were attempting to interest Hamburg's clubgoers in songs called I Hate You and Shut Up, America was overrun with rudimentary suburban kids who had formed bands in the wake of the British invasion: a contemporary documentary about one of them, the Bushmen, estimates about 5,000 teenage bands. If they didn't sound exactly like the Monks, who were far weirder and artier than your average suburban garage band, they didn't sound that different either.

"Garage rock was basic rock'n'roll, played on guitar, bass, drums and maybe organ, largely by kids who thought that being in a band was the best way of picking up girls," says PJ, who has run north London's garage-rock mecca the Dirty Water club for 12 years, and is quick to point out that not every garage band fitted the disaffected-teen stereotype: among the tracks on Nuggets, the seminal 1972 compilation that forever defined garage rock, you can find Out of Our Tree by the Wailers, a band that had been plying a brand of winningly amateur rock'n'roll since 1958. "There wasn't really a British equivalent, because although there were tons of British teens buying guitars in the wake of the Beatles, the Americans had more money, they could afford good gear, cars or vans to go around and play gigs in. You couldn't really have a British garage band, because most of us here didn't have garages to rehearse in."

If the Monks were accidental garage-rock figureheads, then Gonn might have been the apotheosis of the 60s garage band: acid-munching teenagers from Keokuk, a small town in Iowa, who travelled to gigs in a hearse, released the deranged single Blackout of Gretely on their own label and performed in front of a swastika flag. "The only thing the swastika meant to me was Hell's Angels, who existed in the far-off lands of California," says Gonn frontman Craig Moore, who, like Eddie Shaw, was alerted to his bands's posthumous following when rabid record collectors doorstepped him in the late 80s. "I don't remember any reaction to it at all, until I hung it up right underneath a crucifix at the Catholic Teen Centre Dance. The priest came in, he had a European background so I imagine he'd suffered under the Nazis, and he just exploded. I ended up chasing him around the building: 'Father! Father! I'm so sorry!' He woke me up to the fact that the flag represented something that maybe a biker wearing an Iron Cross doesn't."

That somehow seems a telling story. For all their posturing, and the raw power of their single - a second, You're Doing Me In, went unreleased when even the band's fans baulked at the amount of feedback and screaming involved - Gonn made for slightly unconvincing rock'n'roll hoodlums. Behind the shades and sneers in the old photos, the members look rather sweet, not to mention a little pudgy. Moore hoots with laughter. "Of course, we came from nice homes! If you had met any of our parents at the time, you would have thought: 'Totally square!' But we'd seen A Hard Day's Night and the Beatles did everything together in that, so we did everything together. We went to the movies together, chased women together, went to restaurants together. You get five 17-year-old boys together, all pumped up with testosterone, you get antagonistic attitudes. You don't have to stand up to the bully now, because there's five of you the bully's going to take a hike."

Quite why garage bands felt impelled to play up to a delinquent image is an intriguing question. It's not as if the Beatles or any of the other British invasion groups who inspired them acted that way. Even the Rolling Stones' rebellion pales compared to the snottiness of the Standells' Dirty Water or the Lyrics' So What!!!, let alone the wilful offensiveness of the Elastik Band's jaw-dropping Spazz. The darkness and angst in the Monks' music was obviously attributable to the Vietnam war. "We had some dark songs, but we had friends that were still in the army, they had been talking to guys that had come back from Vietnam and the word was out that it was one hell of a bad place. We were getting killed out there," says Gary Berger. "We just thought we wouldn't be doing our civic duty if we didn't say something about it."

Indeed, there's an argument that the shadow of the draft might have influenced the garage bands' anti-establishment stance as much an excess of teenage disaffection, although the war hardly warrants a mention by garage bands, outside of the Monks' oeuvre. PJ suggests the tendency to badass posturing might have had more to do with American cultural inputs. "Teenagers in the States were exposed to a whole series of movies on the subject of delinquency, hundreds of exploitation films about motorbike gangs or whatever. I'm not sure if any of those films got screened over here. Even The Wild One was banned. Over here, there was Beat Girl, with Adam Faith talking in teenage slang in Soho in 1960. It just doesn't have the same appeal as, 'What are you rebelling against?' 'Whaddya got?'"

Garage rock's own appeal seems weirdly perennial. Plenty of aged genres, from northern soul to prog, are kept alive through the ministrations of diehard enthusiasts like PJ but, almost uniquely, garage rock keeps periodically re-emerging as a commercial force or fashionable scene: early grunge artists such as Mudhoney were clearly in the grand tradition of Pacific Northwest garage, while the Dirty Water club's most successful night came when a hotly tipped US duo called the White Stripes played there. Gary Burger, who reformed the Monks in 1999 and still performs with them sporadically, professes a degree of bafflement as to the music's continued appeal - "I dunno why people still like us. Because we were weird? Because we shaved our heads?" - but PJ thinks it's related to its basic aesthetic. "It's carried on because it's immediate, it's exciting, it's the kind of thing that anyone can have a go at, almost immediately after they've picked up an instrument for the first time."

Craig Moore, who's bringing a reformed Gonn over to play their first-ever British dates this summer, agrees. After the band split, he says, he attempted to keep the flame alive by playing Blackout of Gretely to any musicians who came to town. "Every time, they freaked out," he relates proudly. "It seemed to strike the same chord over and over. It comes across like a train coming at you at 150 miles an hour." His voice rises to a bark. "Look out, because that train is coming to England! Look out!"

Black Monk Time and The Early Years 1964-65 by the Monks are out now on Light in the Attic. Gonn play the Dirty Water Club, London, on 19 June, and the Priory, Doncaster, on 20 June