If you grew up in the Midwest in the 2000s and you were interested in underground music, you probably ended up at a few garage rock shows. That’s just how it went down back then. Almost by accident, you could stumble into some basement and see some wasted kids from somewhere in the South wearing striped shirts and yelling through a busted PA with the reverb jacked up.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the genre. When I was a teenager, I thought it was maybe a little narrow-minded. Maybe a little embarrassing. I wanted to listen to Wolf Eyes and Timbaland, not some alcoholic 30-something with a Ramones haircut. But the music had a turbulent energy that, at its most unhinged, was as exciting as anything else in punk or noise. A lot of garage bands were undeniable live. A few of them even wrote pop songs. The late Jay Reatard was the rare example of a garage rocker who checked all boxes.
I met Stephen Pope in the summer of 2006. I was on tour with a proto-noise rap group called Occasional Detroit (RIP Towondo, I’m sorry we never got to reconcile), and Stephen was out with a band called Kazalok. The show was at a venue in Mobile, Alabama called The Cell Block. To the side of the stage, there was a raised platform surrounded by jail bars. I have a memory of Towondo climbing those bars while wearing a full firefighter uniform…
Stephen came up in the Memphis garage scene; he went on to play with Jay Reatard and then Wavves, who he has been rocking with for well over a decade. We got back in touch a few years after that Mobile gig and have since collaborated on music and briefly lived together. Though there’s been a renewed interest in all things post-9/11 but pre-2010, the damaged, provincial garage scene of that era has gone a bit unexplored. So it seemed like an OK time to hit a friend and an authority and chop it up. But what do I know? My sense of timing is always a bit off.
There’s one 2000s garage video that I watch at least once a year: Jay Reatard at Cakeshop in New York.
Oh, yeah, that was the first Pitchfork TV segment.
To me, it’s one of the best rock and roll documents of the past 20 years.
Oh, Jesus.
I’m serious, there was just an intensity when you were playing with him. It felt combustible.
Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird time. I mean, Jay was notoriously very angry all the time, but he mostly let it all out in the music. John Dwyer from Ohsees, Coachwhips, Pink and Brown—he had a similar kind of legend. People would come to his shows half expecting to see a fight.
I remember seeing Dwyer play in Milwaukee when he was a member of The Hospitals. He climbed on top of this jukebox and I thought it was going to tip over. That left a major impression on me. I might’ve been 16 at the time.
Looking back at it, he’s probably the most prolific and consistent “garage rocker” of the 2000s.
The thing about Jay was that he had that destructive energy but he also wrote amazing pop songs.
That was the early-to-mid-2000s, when garage rock was weirdly getting mainstream again. That was a super bizarre time. Because I loved Jay, and I love his music a lot, but I don’t necessarily think it was the right move to try to propel him to be, like, a mainstream act.
It is interesting in retrospect, because garage punk music hasn’t been part of the mainstream indie conversation—or at least that strain of it—for a minute, but his songs were so good, I think that’s why it could happen.
Yeah.
It feels like hardcore is as big as it's ever been, and the garage rock scene is as small as it's been in 20 years.
Well, I was about to say that maybe the garage rock scene isn’t as fashionable, but that is wrong. The Memphis garage rock scene was not fashionable. But Atlanta was insane—people wearing sailor hats and striped shirts and white belts. I love The Carbonas, I love those guys. The first time I saw them, they were awesome, but I remember kind of making fun of them, because they looked put together.
What were you getting into when you were a teenager in Memphis? When did you become aware of Goner Records and all of that stuff?
It was later in high school, which would’ve been 2002, 2003, probably. I first started going to hardcore shows, and then metalcore shows, but I never really connected with it. Also, being in Tennessee, a lot of those shows had a weird sort of Christian element. It all sort of felt sterile and weird. When I was 17 or 18, there were a few bars that would open late and let kids come drink. One of the bars was called The Buccaneer. That’s where Goner had all their shows, where the first Gonerfest was. I guess I liked to drink and party, so I ended up liking that scene a little more.
But it was sort of strange, because it was me, Alex (Gatez), Billy (Hayes) and maybe a couple other teenagers. And the rest of the people in this scene were all left over from the early-’90s kind of garage rock comeback with The Oblivians and John Spencer and stuff. So, it was, I don’t know how we were looked at by the garage rock scene early on, because it was sort of, it was teenagers coming into the room with 40-year-olds.
At the same time, there was this sort of mainstream thing happening with obviously The Strokes and The White Stripes…
I think Detroit and Memphis and New Orleans—and Chicago, too, to some extent—I think those cities sort of held onto the ‘90s garage rock comeback, and those people kept the scene going, at least strong enough where there were still bands coming up. So the underground infrastructure for garage rock was already kind of there, left over from the ‘90s, to propel the huge surge of the 2000s garage rock comeback.
A lot of labels, too, ended up sticking around: Goner, HoZac, Bomp, Criminal IQ, Slovenly, Tic Tac Totally, Crypt, In The Red. And also message boards, weirdly, had a large community. Like Terminal Boredom, and the Goner Board. Chicago had the HoZac Blackout Fest, which, these little festivals, garage rock seemed to be really good at that early on. New Orleans would always do stuff after Jazz Fest and after Mardi Gras, with Quintron. Beerland in Austin was a huge one. Max at Beerland would almost exclusively do garage shows—lots of acts were able to refine their sound there.
When I was in high school, some of the garage stuff from New York that was getting mainstream attention felt removed from the local bands I was seeing, like The Mistreaters, who put out records on Estrus and were connected to this more underground garage world. As an outsider, they felt like parallel tracks. And The White Stripes were maybe the band that connected the two?
Yeah. The White Stripes basically grew up and started going to shows during the ‘90s. In Detroit, Jack White was probably worshiping Mick Collins from The Gories.
For sure.
I saw The White Stripes play at a bar here in, like, 2002, and that’s when Jack White bought Jack Oblivian’s guitar—the red Airline guitar that he used during all the early White Stripes stuff. I think the leftover ‘90s garage rock surge, because that never quite died, allowed The White Stripes and The Hives, who were weirdly a big part of that, too… Europe never lost their interest in garage rock. I remember early on, the first year with Jay, we toured Europe like five times in a year, and we toured the US once. Europeans were just way more supportive of any kind of lightly blues-based garage rock stuff.
That Euro garage shit, that’s it’s own thing, people dressed up in the Austin Powers suits…
There was a booking agency called Kiss And Run tours, based in Groningen, Netherlands, which is where the Vera Club is, that’s one of those legendary European-style venues where you sleep above the stage. It’s the oldest mid-sized venue in Groningen, which is a weirdly enthusiastic town for all things punk. I don’t know if this is still the deal, but you would get an extra 150 Euros or something for every foreign passport that you had, if you were performing.
Wow.
It was the Dutch government’s way of trying to bring in outside culture. We would go to Europe so much, and we would spend like a week in the Netherlands playing, because you got that extra money with the passport. But the guy who ran Kiss And Run tours, who booked like every garage band in Europe, was also from the Netherlands, so that probably helped, too.
I think we met in 2006? By that point, styles had shifted a little bit. A little less blues-based.
Yeah, at that point, The White Stripes had already made their footprint, and The Black Lips, King Khan and BBQ—I mean, King Kahn’s pretty blues-based—but Black Lips got a little more experimental, a little more psych folky, whatever you want to call it. 2005, 2006, The Black Lips were gigantic. Especially in Memphis, they could sell out the Hi Tone, which nobody… King Kahn and BBQ could sell out the Hi Tone, but if one of those “hip” kind of New York bands came along, like Dirty Projectors or something, there would be like 10 people there. It wasn’t pre-internet, but it was before the internet dictated every single thing. So, Memphis still was very insulated from other “hip” modern culture. One-man bands, also, weirdly had a moment during the mid-2000s. Like, Ty Segall started out as a one-man band.
Ty Segall, I know he’s from Laguna Beach, and I always thought it was interesting that he attended high school at the same time as the kids from that classic reality show.
Oh, wow, I did not know that.
I’ve re-watched Laguna Beach multiple times… I did some digging and found a Ty Segall quote about being in a class with Kristin Cavallari.
Was he trying to be cool and bash it?
No, no, he was like, Kristin was cool. He was giving her some respect. Anyways…
King Louie was another big one-man band. King Louie, who recently passed away, he was one of the main songwriters for Exploding Hearts, which, also, another thing you gotta get into if you’re talking about garage rock.
Exploding Hearts, their songs were so catchy that everybody could get behind them.
There was a five year period, if you went to any sort of punk show or garage show, the DJ would play an Exploding Hearts song and The Sonics “The Witch,” which I never need to hear again in my life. It was weird seeing teenagers and garage bands cover that song, like every day, on tour. You know the band The Monks?
Yeah.
They were huge with teenagers in the mid-2000s. It was a pretty bizarre time.
I don’t know if that kind of garage has translated to a new generation. This is an aside, but there’s this 24-year-old kid who has been reviewing some list of the top 500 albums of all-time on TikTok, she’s going through each one.
Yeah.
And she is genuinely kind of into most things, but the one record she could just not fuck with was the Nuggets compilation, which I thought was hilarious.
Huh. I wonder if it has to do with recording quality. I feel like people who haven’t been exposed to lo-fi stuff, it obviously just doesn’t hit as hard, it doesn’t sound as good, especially if you’re listening to a well-produced album before you listen to it.
At a point, the scene kind of reached a critical mass. Maybe around that time of that Cakeshop video I was talking about. There was this whole other lo-fi thing, maybe you would call that garage…
Yeah, I think that the shitgaze scene…
See, this is exactly… Motherfuckers are going to be reading this blog being, like “Shitgaze, what the fuck is that?” But this is why we do this shit, so people know about shitgaze!
I’m convinced that shitgaze came out of garage rock. It’s due to one venue in one city.
Cafe Bourbon Street?
Cafe Bourbon Street in Columbus. Because this guy named Alex from a band called The Feelers used to book at Cafe Bourbon Street. And you had, someone from Times New Viking worked at Cafe Bourbon Street and booked shows. So, I feel like Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit sort of emerged as a response to garage rock. They probably were sick of seeing the same garage rock band cover “The Witch” by The Sonics every night, and started doing something even trashier.
Yeah, and they were influenced by a different strain of ‘90s lo-fi, indie rock.
Yeah.
But there was crossover. In the wake of all of that stuff, it just kind of congealed into this stew of kind of garage, kind of indie, lo-fi music.
Yeah, for sure. We never toured with Psychedelic Horseshit, but I played a bunch of shows with him in various bands. Pink Reason was another artist who tied those worlds together. He played at least one Gonerfest. Also, there maybe just weren’t enough shitgaze bands to go around, so, to stack a bill for a shitgaze band, you had to reach, get a garage rock band. Or some punk band.
And the music kept getting more popular.
Corporate culture started taking over. Vice signed The Black Lips, Vice Magazine started jocking everything garage rock. And then [the now-defunct Toyota car company] Scion started giving away money.
I even got money from Scion to shoot a music video.
Sailor Jerry, the rum company…
That was the end of a certain strand of counterculture.
Converse brought Jay Reatard to do a South American tour, weirdly, with A-Trak, the DJ, and The Rapture.
Good tour?
Yeah, it was a great tour. That was 2009. I think that might’ve been the peak, and then it all started going down.
With Wavves, you kind of journeyed out of the murk and started making records that didn’t have a horrible fidelity.
A few months before I joined Wavves, he was getting all this backlash from mainly Psychedelic Horseshit. I don’t know if you remember that.
I do.
He started selling shirts that said Wavves Suxx.
Didn’t Nathan pose next to him and take a photo, and the Psychedelic Horseshit guy didn’t know he was standing next to the singer of Wavves?
Yeah.
It’s funny, all of this super insular scene stuff, now it’s 15 years later and it’s like, who gives a shit.
Matt from Psychedelic Horseshit calmed down a little bit. I haven’t kept in touch really, but five years ago we were in Columbus, and he was still there, and I was able to find him, and I bought weed from him.
Well, that’s a happy ending if I’ve ever heard one.
Yeah.
Wavves leaves for tour with Cloud Nothings a few weeks. Stephen Pope on Instagram and Twitter