The Monks’ tenure as Hamburg’s premier tonsure-coiffed proto-punks lasted barely two years—they released their Black Monk Time LP in 1966 and, following a few more singles, disbanded by 1967. While playing clubs in the same seedy Reeperbahn district that the Beatles had lit up only a few years earlier, the American G.I. soldiers in the Monks followed their own path. Filled with manic, rhythm-focused arrangements that employed Dave Day’s banjo as an auxiliary percussive layer, Black Monk Time ranks in the upper echelon of obscure ’60s gems with its own voice, not trying to imitate contemporary chart-toppers. Like Silver Apples’ self-titled 1968 debut and few others, it still sounds new in the 21st century.
Following a 2009 collection of early demos, Hamburg Recordings 1967 pulls together what is posited as the last unreleased Monks material, 15 minutes worth of odds and ends recorded during the band’s final year. But, fun as it is, it’s mostly ends. While Monks fans will surely be glad to have any more examples of the band at work, only one of the songs feels as developed as anything on Black Monk Time or their subsequent singles. Recorded during February 1967 sessions for the band’s final 7” “Love Can Tame the Wild,” the disc-opening “I’m Watching You” taps into the quintet’s tightly-wound art-rock menace with an apparent effortlessness, guitar and organ riffs spiraling into a nearly cymbal-less slash. It was a sound the band spent much of the previous years refining, a rhythmic muse that had drummer Roger Johnston removing extraneous percussion, much like his contemporary Moe Tucker across the Atlantic in the Velvet Underground.
Though each song is charming and Monk-like in its own ways, pointing in a few otherwise undocumented directions, the remaining four tracks of Hamburg Recordings 1967 serve to highlight what was so remarkable about the Monks’ earlier work. Recorded onstage after-hours at the Top Ten Club—where the Beatles lived in the attic six years previous—the remaining songs reveal a still-developing band, seemingly moving away from the darker vibes for which they would be remembered. Just as the nearly harsh grooves and blunt lyrics of Black Monk Time sometimes parallel the Velvet Underground, the vaudevillian lilt of “Julia” seems to predict the music hall tendencies of Sgt. Pepper, or merely echoes the electrified jug bandisms of the Lovin’ Spoonful.
Like the Beatles before them, the Monks churned out music for six hours a night (eight or more on weekends), covering the hits of the day, including Chuck Berry, British Invasion singles, and surf tunes. But the originals sounded little like that, and—in the band’s accounts—they kept hammering away until they sounded even more original. With a number of previously unseen candid photos reproduced in the packaging, the Monks (or just “Monks” as their business cards and stylized organ cabinet read) look as if they are from a time of their own. They stare down future listeners with a severe post-Beatnik/pre-psychedelic vibe from an alternate time-track, each band member sporting the literal and ominous opposite of a moptop, shaving the domes of their heads.
But little of the unheard Monks on Hamburg Recordings 1967 communicates quite the same worked-over attention to detail emitted by Blank Monk Time, nor the blunt anti-war sentiments. On “P.O. Box 3291,” they sound more like a standard-issue garage band. Across the disc’s final two tracks, an uncredited trumpet player doubles Larry Clark’s organ in places to create an imitation horn section, pointing the way towards yet another future the Monks didn’t have.
With a trumpet part that recalls Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light,” the disc-closing instrumental “Yellow Grass” maybe sounds more like their Hamburg contemporaries, and less like the weirdos that record collectors would revere decades later. But with no vintage live Monks reels yet discovered in a German attic, Hamburg Recordings 1967 is the last sound of a band still being born.
