Garage Rock

Garage rock is what happened when millions of American teenagers heard the British Invasion and went home to play it themselves. The name is literal: bands recording in garages, basements and cheap studios across the United States, with varying levels of skill and production, producing a few hundred thousand singles between 1963 and 1968. Most of them sold locally or not at all.

The music was distinguished by its rawness — the distorted guitar tone of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” (1964), widely credited as the first riff to use deliberate amplifier distortion, was as important as anything in garage rock’s DNA. American bands like the Kingsmen (“Louie Louie”), the Sonics (“Psycho,” “The Witch”), and the Seeds took the Kinks’ aggression and the Stones’ attitude and added their own local texture.

What matters historically is what garage rock did after the 1960s: the Velvet Underground, the Stooges (Iggy Pop) and the New York Dolls in the early 1970s took garage rock’s spirit and amplified its darkness. The Ramones distilled it to its essence. When Jon Savage compiled Nuggets in 1972 — the defining compilation of 1960s garage tracks — he named the music that became the foundation of punk’s self-understanding.