QUESTION MARK AND THE MYSTERIANS (? AND THE MYSTERIANS) 
By 1971, the term “punk rock” had already been applied retrospectively by Greg Shaw as well as Greil Marcus to American bands such as Question Mark & the Mysterians, the Standells, the Seeds, the Shadows of Knight and the Kingsmen who managed to score some hit songs during the height of the British Invasion. In 1972, Lenny Kaye popularized the term in the first definitive compilation album that he helped assemble for this music, called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968; his liner notes are almost as legendary as the double-album itself. (This music is now referred to as garage rock and psychedelic rock). (April 2010) * * * Only last year did I discover that the Premiers were a Chicano band; there was a show on PBS that explained how this band and so many other Latin bands had been chased off the charts by the British Invasion. They are hardly the only ones; Question Mark and the Mysterians are a dynamite Latino garage rock band with a big hit to their credit, “96 Tears”. Their bandleader had his name legally changed to ? (though it was usually spelled out) decades before Prince did something similar – at least ?’s was a pronounceable symbol. Thee Midniters is yet a third one familiar to those in the know; generally bands who use “thee” are Latino bands. (January 2011) * * * American teenagers (mostly white suburban kids) were also invigorated by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all the rest; and they responded by launching a counter-assault, when seemingly every kid in America wanted to be in a band. This era is now known as the garage rock era (that was the most available practice space for most of these would-be rock stars, hence the name); this time period also saw the beginnings of the psychedelic rock movement on both sides of the Atlantic. I didn’t know exactly what I was hearing at the time, but the music by bands like the Seeds, Blues Magoos, the Electric Prunes, Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Standells, Count Five, and Strawberry Alarm Clock (among many other bands) was grabbing me almost immediately. I don’t know that I even realized immediately how bizarre many of these American band names were, as compared to those of British Invasion bands like the Animals, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Dave Clark Five. Thankfully, in 1972 (though if I’m not mistaken, the album was actually not released in the US until 1976), Lenny Kaye – later the guitarist for the seminal Patti Smith Group – helped assemble hit songs by all of these diverse bands plus plenty more into what is now regarded as one of the greatest compilation albums of all time: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. It remains one of my favorite records, and I have spoken of it several times before in these posts. (January 2013) * * * The Nuggets album collected the garage rock and psychedelic rock hits and would-be hits from the mid-1960’s from bands like the Electric Prunes, Blues Magoos, the Standells, the Seeds, etc. There are some omissions, but Nuggets is as good an overview of this scene as there is. “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians is the missing song that always comes to mind for me (that song didn’t even make the Nuggets Box Set, though it was on the list for the Nuggets, Volume 2 album that was programmed but never released). Interestingly, Wikipedia notes: “One of the earliest written uses of the ‘punk’ term was by critic Dave Marsh who used it in 1970 to describe the group Question Mark and the Mysterians, who had scored a major hit with their song ‘96 Tears’ in 1966.” Here is what I have to say about this album: https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockvocalists/home/the-pantheon/greatly-appreciated-stories/nuggets-1 . (December 2016) |