Pitchfork

Photo by Gary Burger

Dave Day, original guitarist and founding member of the innovative garage-rock outfit the Monks, died yesterday. It's hard to convey now how impossibly cool the Monks seemed in the early 1990s, just before the time their debut album Black Monk Time was to be reissued. I remember reading a few magazine pieces about them that set my head swimming. They were G.I.s stationed in Germany. Only a select few in the know had ever heard their music. They released a single album in 1966. They played heavy, repetitive, tribal rock'n'roll. They experimented. They shaved their heads and dressed in robes and called themselves the Monks. I mean, what the hell? They seemed like the Velvet Underground with cool costumes and a better sense of humor a year before the fact. And then, if you watch these videos, especially this German television clip of "Monk Chant", all that energy and originality comes across. They eventually reformed in 1999 and played live periodically thereafter. The force of the last clip, from 2006, forty years on, is equally amazing. R.I.P.

The Monks: "Monk Chant"

 

The Monks: "Cuckoo"