Lester says

"Juju cackles like Wooly Bully which is indescribable and was recorded
by a bunch of guys who drove around in a hearse wearing turbans."

I think everyone had some pretty good ideas in the recent  thread about the Bold Stumps plans for 2020. John is right that the thing I'm thinking about the most is the idea of a garage band. And I think that means some fun and not too serious. But to have a point of view. So make lists And narrow them down, yes. But ... openness and honor to the actual life and event of each song is crucial.

When we used to play in the basement, which is the same as the garage, we would try and do things short and so explore a lot of songs that way. And so that calls for some precision. And certainly, Jay Geils was a band that had a lot of precision and fun, at the start – tho, after seeing their precision 3 times, I felt I’d seen them. It was like they weren't exploring - well not as much as when they started. So truth to the song in the moment can be challenge.

Looking back from my time warped point of view there was actually a philosophy behind the garage ethose that I was devouring. I had no technique or chops, but the thing was not done without some reflective contemplation. The philosophy is something I would buy at a music store - It was Cream magazine.

Lester Banks in Creem would write about this stuff. In a pretty Beat wigged out style. Like Holy War dispatches. And he would explain to you why Alice Cooper and Question Mark were  better than Grand Funk and Led Zepplin. And he could change is mind too, or pretend to. *

And so anyway, I got out Lester's Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor Dung tonight. Thought I'd read a little bit from that. Hadnt realized he actually devoted a piece to Psychotic Reaction by the Count Five, although he kept trying to talk about the Yardbirds. I think Lester was saying riffs are there to steal, but to steal spiritedly, to find something new is essential and high art is the enemy.

[To me the Yardbirds were pointing  to a future after Led Zepplin. What it turned out to be, the Yardbrids could not see any better than us: Punk in the end came and went, well after the band of DeMark’s (and Haas’s) basement dispersed for some decades.]

In the following passage, Lester pretends he’s an old, digressing man. Talking to his grandkids. Telling them about the war. It was a war against long drugged out solos - against 3 songs on an album, and lip service to the act of tornado. 

I skip some pretty good parts about drinking Romilar and having a karmic flash listening to Question Mark. He writes:

The Yardbirds as I said were incredible. They came stampeding in and just blew everybody clean off the tracks. They were so fucking good in fact that people were still imitating them as much as a decade later, and getting rich doing it, because the original band of geniuses just didn't last that long.  

Of course, none of their stepchildren were half as good and got increasingly pretentious and overblown as time went on, until about 1973 when a bunch emaciated  fobs called Led Zeppelin played their final concert … [The Yardbirds] only lasted a couple years, and some of the imitators they had! I used to get my yucks just looking at those records, like when they did I'm a man, and made the top 10 with a mixture of Bo Diddley... [but you're] too young to remember the big cultural Civil War, when Beefhard had to take to the hills of Costa Rica, to hide. Till things cool down some and feedback …everybody just blew their wads and flopped over, because all that electronic distorts stuff. 

But I'm digressing again. You kids are right - I'm turning into an old goat with shit for brains. I had all this stuff from Teeno groups everywhere, who made wind up versions of I'm a man to fill out the debut albums like the Royal Guardsmen, who had the number one hits with the gimmick of this dog named Snoopy shooting down old Germans I swear to God. And then punk bands start cropping up who are writing their own songs but taking the Yarbird sound and reducing it to this kinda goony fuzz tone clatter. Oh, it was beautiful. It was pure folklore, old America.  Sometimes I think those are the best days ever. 

Man, I used to get up in the morning in ‘65 and ‘66 and just love to run and turn on that radio there was so much good stuff boiling out like there was a song called Hey Joe that literally everybody and his fucking brother had not only recorded but claimed to have written, even though it was obviously the psychedelic mutation to some hoary old folk song which is about murdering somebody for love just like nine tenths of the rest of them hoary Folk ballads, and a group called the leaves had a killer [version] … and then disappeared after a couple of weird albums, 

Things started to go downhill. Instead of singing about taking tea with Mary Jane and [banging] old sweet Annie it was ‘help me God I don't know the meaning of life I believe that love is going to cure the world of psoriasis and cancer, both and I'm going to tell the people all about it, 285, different ways whether you like it or not. And why is there war well go ask the children they know everything we need to know’ … and well at that point I started to pack in and resort back to my old good old ‘66 goof squat rock. I got out records like 96 tears by question mark and the mysterions, who were mysterious indeed and reboot to jungle Juju cackles like Wooly Bully which is indescribable and was recorded by a bunch of guys who drove around in a hearse wearing turbans. 

That was also when I got back into the junior … Yardbirds imitations in a big way like there was Backdoor Men by the shadows of knight who were really good at copying the Yardbirds riff and reworking them, and then Psychotic Reaction by count five but they weren't so hot added actually but [they ripped their whole routine with such grungy spunk] that I really dug them the most. Just a few months after I'm a man left the charts they got right in there with this inept imitation called psychotic reaction and it was a big hit in fact I think it was an even bigger hit than I'm a man, which burned me up at the time. it was actually cool now that I think about it yeah perfectly appropriate. The song was the schlock house grinder. Completely fatuous. It started out with this fuzz guitar riff they stole off a Johnny rivers hit, then went into one of the stupidest vocals of all time, it went Let me see some jive like ...

I feel depressed, I feel so bad, because you're the best girl that I ever had. I can't get your love I can't get affection. Oh little girl psychotic reaction and it feels like this …  

and then they [skewed off] into an exact I'm a man rip off - it was absolute dynamite I hated it at first but then one day I was driving down the road stoned and it came on and I clap my noggin…..

Okay enough fair use rip off of Late Lester. So be it with all philosophy. No thing but in the thing. And something I coined myself tonight: You don’t know what you know until you intuit it. – JV.

Something other in a not dissimilar vein.

*Punk, or garage, as a genre, was first outlined in the liner notes of "Nuggets" by Lenny Kaye, but he was an officer in the Cream Magazine Party, led by First Officer Lester Bangs.