"Our mission,” says the Gories’ Mick Collins in Eric Davidson’s We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001, “was to be a band that was so raw and primitive that it would change their definitions of those words.” Mission accomplished. Before breaking up in 1992, the trio of Collins, fellow singer/guitarist Dan Kroha, and drummer Peggy O’Neill set back garage rock by thirty years—which was exactly the point. Disgusted by the polished jangle of much of the garage revival of the 80s, the Gories turned rudimentary musicianship into a fuck-you virtue, making the punk of any era sound like Vivaldi. Until now, the Gories have been documented by studio recordings, including three untouchably savage LPs and a barrage of singles and compilation cuts. The only thing missing was a live album—which has now been rectified by The Shaw Tapes: Live in Detroit 5/27/88.
Recorded at a party in a converted Detroit storefront in the spring of 1988—a year before the Gories’ debut album, House Rockin’—The Shaw Tapes bleeds Motor City tradition. Of the albums many cover songs, four of them are by Detroit artists: the Keggs’ 60s garage-punk scorcher “To Find Out”; Eddie Holland’s punchy, early-Motown R&B stomper “Leaving Here” (although the Gories’ rendition seems to owe more to the Who’s guitar-heavy 1965 version); the Stooges’ primal, sinister “Real Cool Time”; and “Again & Again,” a rare track by Iggy Pop’s pre-Stooges outfit the Iguanas. “To Find Out” is the only song of the four that the Gories eventually recording in the studio. The rest are pulped to a slovenly blur of brute havoc. As if deconstructing the Detroit rock mythos he’d never stray from (his current band the Dirtbombs included), Collins howls his head off during a run through John Lee Hooker’s seminal 1948 debut, “Boogie Chillen’”—a song that recounts Hooker’s arrival in Detroit (where the original single was recorded), and his experience being a stranger who “was walking down Hastings Street”, heard tell of “Henry’s Swing Club”, and dropped in to find everyone “really having a ball.”
That same air of raucous chaos suffuses The Shaw Tapes. The storefront that the Gories played in may not have been Henry’s Swing Club, but it swung nonetheless—that is, if the crowd noise is to be believed. Sweat practically oozes out of the group’s feverish, stripped-to-the-skivvies versions of the Stoics’ nasty, 1967 anthem “Hate”, not to mention a face-clawing brawl with the Yardbirds’ arrangement of Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept-A-Rollin’”. It’s the scabrous renditions of Gories originals, though, that is most gripping. Drawn almost entirely from the body of material that would form House Rockin’, these off-kilter, out-of-tune iterations of “I Think I’ve Had It”, “Charm Bag”, “Sovereignty Flight”, and “Give Me Love” show just how deliberate their demolition was before it became ever-so-slightly contained it. And when Collins busts into the soon-to-be-anthem “Thunderbird ESQ”—an ode to the fortified wine he’s admitted to chugging whole bottles of before going onstage back then—it’s as if the song had always existed, a fossil just waiting to be excavated, cloned, and set loose upon the world.
As blistering and vital as The Shaw Tapes is, it’s not the definitive Gories live album. Theoretically such a record would have to include far more of the band’s originals, especially classics like “Nitroglycerine” from 1990’s I Know You Fine, But How You Doin’ and “Telepathic” from 1992’s Outta Here, which demonstrate just how potent and confident the Gories became just before imploding. That fact only slightly diminishes the importance of The Shaw Tapes—a slapdash snapshot of a young, feral gang of throwbacks reinventing a genre by uninventing it.
