There's bad timing, and then there's Mooney Suzuki timing. The New York City foursome has the dubious distinction of arriving both too soon and too late for the turn-of-century garage rock windfall that should've guaranteed they'd never have to shop at a thrift store again. Their debut single "A Simple Life" hopped aboard the Velvets' "Foggy Notion" locomotion four years before The Strokes rode the same track to the bank. But with no attendant flock of screaming hipster girls to chase them down the street, the Mooneys were relegated to the niche mod-revivalist party circuit.
By the time the band finally scored a major label deal with Columbia, even the Hives were old news, and the unfortunate fate of 2004's glam-glossed Alive & Amplified proves that the only thing that's worse than being labeled a sellout is actually failing to sell, especially when you have seemingly infallible hitmakers the Matrix on retainer. Well, the Matrix proved quite fallible, and worse, the wave of negative reviews that greeted Alive & Amplified characterized the Mooneys as Johnny-Thunders-come-latelys to a garage rock get-down that they helped organize. As if to reinforce just how far Alive & Amplified strayed from the Mooneys' mod-punk pedigree, the band's current Wikipedia entry actually lists Hanoi Rocks as a primary reference point.
Ironically, the one fortuitous move the band has made was naming themselves after the two singers from Can-- their Damo Suzuki nod inadvertently scored them a regular gig soundtracking Suzuki car commercials. But kids, there was a time when the Mooney Suzuki represented something more than just clever brand synergy. In 1999, the Mooneys recorded the six-song Maximum Black EP, one of the greatest, most rama-lama-righteous artifacts of the modern garage rock era. Prior to this reissue, it's pretty much only been available to those standing within a 10-block radius of St. Mark's Place.
The Mooney Suzuki circa 1999 sounded like how we like to think 60s garage-rock sounded: feral, drunk on bad attitude, and powered by distorted amplifiers sucking up enough electricity to black out entire city blocks. The devastating back-to-back fuzzbombs of "Turn My Blue Sky Black" and "Your Love is a Gentle Whip" honor the MC5/Stooges/Blue Cheer school of apocalyptic proto-punk, with feedback fade-outs that last almost as long as the songs that precede them. But what made the Mooneys more than just another band of mop-topped misanthropes was frontman Sammy James Jr.'s allegiances to the participatory tenets of Motown ("Half My Heart") and the paisley-patterned pop tones of the Byrds and Love ("My Dear Persophone"). Like a young Arthur Lee, James tempers his tough talk with a soft touch; even when the Mooneys are at their most pedal-stompin' petulant, his charismatically soulful pipes cut through the noise with impressive clarity.
But the Mooneys' melodic fortitude is further revealed here on five previously unreleased tracks from the era. James claims they were initially buried for fear of being stereotyped as a mod band, and the "Taxman" redux of "Right On" and Brit-Invasion-by-numbers of "Tell Me Why" support that theory. But James also denied himself a career-best performance with the winsome jangle-pop melancholy of "This Lonely Land", the sort of song designed to follow a particularly painful break-up at a high school dance in the summer of '64. If only the Mooneys had brought this tune to the Matrix, they could've, if not scored a platinum record, at least cut in on The Fountains of Wayne's monopoly on major label-sponsored power pop. Like the song's unattainable female subject, perhaps the Mooney Suzuki are destined to "to be the one that no one can love."
