Mojo - The Music Magazine

ONE OF THE MOST startlingly original bands in rock'n'roll history - and one of the most shrouded in legend - The Monks have light shone in their dark corner this month with the reissue of their classic 1965 debut album, Black Monk Time.

Formed by American GIs stationed in West Germany, the quintet's groundbreaking sound - a hard-driving hammer-groove heavy on electric banjo - and aggressive Dadaist vibe, made an impression on soon-to-be-Krautrockers like Faust's Hans-Joachim Irmler. Their peculiar style - they shaved their heads into clerical tonsures - and militant anti-Vietnam stance guaranteed polarised audiences.

Subsequently, they'd be cited as a punk pre-text by Nuggets-heads, garage rock orcs, and later, The Fall. A Monks tribute album, Silver Monk Time, featuring covers by The Gossip, Jon Spencer, Faust and The Fall, was released in 2007.

But they were prophets largely unrecognized in their own time. "The audiences hated us," bassist Eddie Shaw tells MOJO, before outlining a tale of speed-addled drummers, experimental producers and an inspired managerial du-umvirate, Karl-Heinz Remy and Walther Niemann, who turned a lively young group of rockers called The Five Torquays into a nihilist art project entitled The Monks.

There follows the director's cut of the short Q&A that appears in this month's MOJO magazine. Eddie Shaw talks to MOJO's Andrew Male...

MOJO: Imagine if someone had told you in 1966 that Black Monk Time would be reissued for the fourth time in 2009...
Eddie Shaw: Well, given that for 30 years none of us even talked about it... In the late '80s People magazine did an interview with The Lunachicks and they were talking about the Monks, saying we were a bunch of AWOL GIs who showed up on German TV singing I Hate You and thumbing their noses at the military police... and hadn't been heard of since. Then in 1992 Mike Stax from Ugly Things fanzine and Keith Patterson came to my door and said, 'Are you Eddie Shaw of the Monks?' I almost slammed the door on them but I said, 'Yeah? Why do you ask?'. They spent the weekend doing an interview, drinking beer and playing these old songs, I hadn't played in 30 years. Then I called Gary in Minnesota and said, 'There are these two guys who claim a lot of people like our music.' He said, 'Fuck you,' and hung up. It wasn't nice. He thought I was creating some kind of trouble.

How much of The Monks was down to you and how much to your managers?
This is what lot of people have a hard time understanding. Karl, he was the power guy in the management. He didn't own a record, let alone a record player. His job was marketing and branding and he was ahead of his time. He'd say, 'You're not a Torquay any more, you're a Monk and Monk does this or that,' like he was our political manager. This was branding but no-one understood that at the time. For us it was about walking down the street and have people move out of the way, thinking you were some kind of holy order until you said 'Fuck' or lit up a cigarette. It was an experiment in human behaviour and deconstruction.

When you play people Black Monk Time 40 years on, they're open-mouthed... It still has the power.
If you didn't have the stuff about Vietnam on there that whole album wouldn't be dated. It might have been recorded a few days ago. I'm talking about the artistic aspect, not so much the political aspect. I started at 14 years old playing in a casino on the backstage, while Wayne Newton and his brother were on the front stage, and he was 12. I come from a family of musicians. My aunt almost married Luke Wills and they used to hang out at our house and drink a lot of whiskey and chase the kids away. My great uncles were in the Stamford Quartet. They used to write religious songs and drink whiskey every night to get the spirit - totally drunk out of their minds.

Was the change from the Torquays to the Monks harder for some members of the band than others?
Well, yes, for the traditional rock'n'roller it was a very hard thing. For me, as a jazz musician, I welcomed it as it was an experiment and I loved experiments.

What did they find hardest - the shaved heads or the musical shift?
Well, yeah, the musical thing.

One of the things that I found most surprising, given the stories you hear about most producers during the '60s, is that you had a pretty understanding producer for Black Monk Time...
Jimmy Bowein was an experimentalist. He was a technical guy. I had worked with all kinds of producers: Bob Johnston in Nashville who sat and smiled and passed out the joints; Jack Richardson, who did The Guess Who and Alice Cooper, who was a scientist and compressed everything. Jimmy Bowein was a technician and he was always interested in the idea that we played so loud at that time. The recording techniques had to record quiet, to get the separation between mics. They tried to put us in a huge room, way far away from each other but then we couldn't communicate, and actually the Monks music isn't easy to play as it makes changes at odd places. It's not a thing that you can go '8 bars 12 bars 4 bars...'

To get the sound we had to play so loud and of course the engineer said, Well this is impossible, we can't do this. But then Jimmy Bowein, being the technician that he is, got a big long spool of tape and ran it about 40 feet across to a door knob and all the way back to the echo unit and found a way where we could play and get that wavelength to at least be on the tape without the wash. And it worked.

He was thinking of new ways to get this sound out of a 1966 studio...
Yes. He told me, when he first came to see us at the Top Ten club in Hamburg, he had to stand outside the club to listen to us, as inside he couldn't hear what we were doing. He had to go outside. He said, 'I listened to you outside and ran through my mind all the different ways that I couldn't do this and came away with the conclusion that, yes, I could.'

How did live audiences respond to the Monks sound?
With anger (laughs). Some of them got very upset. The further south in Germany we went the more they hated you. In fact we got attacked one night on stage when we were playing. That was in some small town and they had to keep the lights on to keep the tension down. We played in one town with a German band and they were all huge, 6 foot something, too tall to be any good (laughs). But they absolutely hated us - they said 'If we had your equipment...' They said the reason that we had got a recording contract was because of our equipment (laughs incredulously). They would talk down to the audience about us before we came on as they were our opening act. You just learned to ignore it. But The Kinks didn't like us either...

What happened there?
We were playing in Cologne and it started off badly, Dave Davies - there a young girl of about 12 who asked for an autograph, somehow she had managed to get backstage, and he told her to fuck off. But [Monks banjo player] Dave Day, who, if he'd had a pink Cadillac he'd have given it to his first fan, Dave got into a verbal altercation with Dave Davies who basically told him to fuck off as well. We played and they came on and played and the audience actually liked us better. When they got off stage the two brothers were yelling and screaming at each other, which was kind of funny.

One story I've heard lots of versions of is that your managers wanted you to go play Vietnam...
We were booked to go to Vietnam. Gary and I had gone to the consulate and got our visas. We were stamped and ready to go, and there were three of us sitting in Frankfurt ready to fly, going to go out into the nightclubs, not officially on a safe US base.

What was the thinking behind that? Whose idea was that?
Because of the war there was a demand from nightclubs in Saigon and places like that where the troops were going downtown and chasing the women and stuff... We would've been on the economy. But a month before one of the guys in one of the bands over there got killed and one of them got wounded when someone rolled a grenade onstage. That made a couple of the guys nervous and of course the rest of us, being too stupid... I think maybe because we'd been in the army there was a little bit of that dullness of perception... you know, we can do this, it doesn't matter. But as the three of us were sat in the international café waiting for the other two to show up, somebody came up with a letter from Gary Burger saying he was in Sweden and he wasn't coming back. Roger had gone to Texas to visit his family and he didn't show either. So that was it. Of the three of us who were left, Dave took off someplace. Larry and I worked for about two months in a place serving wine. From that Larry and I got a trans-steamer and came home.

So that was also the end of the band?
Well yeah. It was probably a good thing in a way.

Why do you say that?
Who knows what would have happened? The idea of us going over there and singing to all those troops may not have been a good idea.

Did you ever hear from Gary about why he decided he wasn't coming back?
He said he'd got a letter from Roger saying he wasn't coming back, so there was no reason to go on. There was another drummer, Sudi, who wanted to come with us. Roger had some amphetamine problems. He was getting to where he was sick a lot. The drummer, Sudi, who was English, was a softer player and the music wasn't the same.

Was it strange returning to America?
It was. You're raised in one culture and you know the restrictions of the culture and you work within them. When you go to another country you are suddenly culture-free. You learn by accident what you can and can't do but in a sense you're sort of liberated. Returning to Mississippi after I'd experienced that, I found it hard to readjust.

For one thing, when I got home I was thinking and dreaming in German and when I would talk to my old friends I would get this smile on my face and they thought I was on drugs or something and I knew I had to get out of there. So, there was this school in Minneapolis and I corresponded with Gary and Gary says, 'There's a school here if you want to go to school here'. I knew I needed to get out of there so I went to school in Minneapolis. But I ended up back on the road. I realised I'm happiest being a musician. I'm one of those lucky guys who still gets to play a lot...

But you've written books and you're a photographer as well?
I've got a book about to come out called Minnesota Bird And The Irresistible Urge but it might be called The Trumpet Player. It's about a guy who keeps flying through windows. He's a guy who's so stoned when he goes to play a recording session he can only play one note. It gets its final edit this month.

Are you still in contact with Gary?
The older we get the harder it is for us to get along (laughs). I don't know why. Familiarity breeds contempt (laughs). I'm not going to say anything bad about any of them and I hope they're not going to say anything bad about me. We're just at a certain age...

How do you feel about the Monks' album being re-issued again?
I think it's nice. Everything that's going on here is fine. I'm pleased that Light In The Attic is doing it. They might actually turn us into rock'n'roll stars... I don't know if it would be good or not (laughs).

Tell us something that you've never told anyone about the Monks before?
The Monks are really very normal people. There were no geniuses in the band. We just got all the ingredients right.

Interview by: Andrew Male

For more information on the reissue of Black Monk Time go to www.lightintheattic.net