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The Ganlgians Monster Head Room

As another band from sunny California, Ganglians are a “Wish You Were Here” picture postcard of secret Rock and Roll whereupon flipping the postcard over you find “right behind you” written on the back. It’s easily identifiable as some sort of garage psychedelia. But Secret Rock and Roll is a much cooler genre misnomer.

You have three types of Rock and Roll (adjusted for inflation and embellishment) and they are these: Rock and Roll that is meant to pick you up; Rock and Roll that pounds you into the earth like a coffin nail; and then the secret kind of Rock and Roll. The first two R&R’s can throw you through a plate glass window or maybe slingshot your brains into the sun, but Ganglians’, Monster Head Room, as was said before is the Secret Rock and Roll. It’s so quiet about it’s thunder. It’s the Rock and Roll that just leaves you the fuck alone and rages at the table across from you. It’s the type of rage though that isn’t the viscous punk throwing over the table. It’s the type of rage a computer feels while reading seventeen Victorian novels at once. While a lot of records do the garage thing with – We are sorry to type this next part – punk adolescence with a virulent urge for the things “really noisy”, our boys Ganglian seem busy taking things easy and hard chilling with it. You have to be careful listening to Monster Head Room while you are lifting things, or not lying down, or if you were required to drive the speed limit. It’s also important to add that it is really something when you can tell a band isn’t trying their damnedest to let you know “WE ARE ROCKING HERE!!!!” Of course We like rocking of that kind too but We also like to be stress free. We recommend listening to Monster Head Room for your relax time in this case.

Monster Head Room is a mark-ed swerve from the Ganglians’ self titled release from simply a lower volume standpoint. This record is quieter, totally contemplative and even manages to take all the heroine passages of the beginnings and turn them into weeded out come-downs. *personal note: We’d refrain from referring to musical phenomenon with drugged out similes and other such nonsense but seriously, how many times can you have lyrics about smoking weed and not just carry that idea in the burlap sack of your mind, so at any time ready to whip out the goods about what these guys really care about* Who says that you can’t rock’n’roll soft but carry a big God damned stick? Why does switched-on have to mean deafening lights and rolling in broken glass? The answer is it doesn’t. Oh how is doesn’t too!? That is exactly what Ganglians have punched into the face of Rock and Roll here.

Talk about a mind bender – when you go from the flippantly, nearly hobo-austere openers of “Something Should Be Said” and “Voodoo” and into the absolutely groovin’ internet praised hit ”Valiant Brave”, it’s less than accurate to say two things; “whoa” and “that’s cool”. At record’s high water mark, “The Void” can start to give you the picture of how badly these hippy pimps have been holding back and why the impressions of Monster Head Room start to muddy even further. The rest of the record plays out as smoothly and surprisingly as the first half without almost any idea that it had happened. When you first started listening to Ganglians you had no idea you’d be stranded here on this desert island they’d created, but by the end of it you decide to stay. The thought then strikes you that maybe you had always been on that musical desert island. How else would explain feeling so comfortable listening to it and with almost no prompting?

From another weird standpoint Monster Head Room is still a bit non-poignant about there being one discernible way to listen to it. Not surprisingly though, it is this that may be the point. This point can be taken as a suggestion really. That’s the excellent news. You are not being fed something solid. You’re being bottled with a perspective, a perspective that you are free to subscribe to or not.

Before we go on any further about what Monster Head Room does and how you could handle its general aesthetic, it is important to note that you, the reader, should be reading this with a healthy, gigantic realization that getdeliciousDOTnet is taking creative/poetic license. As of right now Ganglians are keeping mum about the real intentions of their music. This is also excellent news.

Furthermore, the perpsective is like this:
Instead of touting what you know is the absolute truth – in this case the truth about things cold and chiseled and rock and roll – is that that “fact”, that “truth” it is just ignant! That’s ignant (ignorant and impossible to be sure about)! Being non-poignant can be advantageous if it’s laid out in the approach. We happen to believe that Monster Head Room is tied up with this approach, so instead of sitting down to some roundtable in order to have it out with Rock and Roll they are able to become a really surprisingly secret, Rock and Roll band.

So what is the secret though? Kenny Roger’s talked about knowing when to hold them and also about when to fold them. Maybe having a general idea and “come what may attitude” is really what is important and you’re not really going to know it until that final atom-bomb moment when you totally “get” that you are really never going to know. Before that you can have a good idea. You can have calculated, called, bet on and dealt with all the variables, you can have put most of your “known” ducks in a row, but not until you read “look behind you” on that “Wish you were here!” postcard do you finally get the joke. In the meantime, enjoy it. Feel confident too. There is monster head room for it.

Dick Dale & The Del-Tones “Night Rider”

Dick Dale is the kind of man that in the course of his early career burnt out, busted through, knocked down, rubbed raw and rode to death forty-nine Fender amplifiers. Forty-nine separate amplifiers on forty-nine separate occasions playing forty-nine separate licks, live, were blown to smithereens as it were, and made inoperable. This was all in the course of only a few years. It would be an understatement to say that the man was just too much for his era and its electronics. We are more surprised that Leo Fender didn’t canvas WANTED! posters all over Newport and Balboa, California from ‘57-’60 because of the acts committed against machinery or the amplific arson that took place. Well, because of this Dale has been hailed as the leader of the Power Players. He literally fits there. He is also ascribed the moniker “King of The Surf Guitar” where he, a deity of line hugging guitar riffs played at terrifyingly high volume, typified a real, authentic genre of Rock and Roll music – Surf music.

Most people in this new millennium, fifty plus years after what getdelicious is calling “The Amplifire Massacre at Balboa Beach”, would have no problem recalling the opening theme from Pulp Ficition. They’d also not be hard pressed to remember it as being cool – really, really cool sounding, but maybe those same people would have a hard time telling someone else who actually played that satanic and eastern sizzled belly-dance, or why they thought it was totally cool. Dale’s music just feels right so it doesn’t really matter much in the big picture of who was responsible and responsible for what, and maybe that is because the music is really the only thing that matters. Hold on though. If we thought an idea like that held any water, well we would not be here. We would not be writing this. Instead, you’d be reading about hot-rods or researching that if you stole enough catalytic converters that you’d potentially be able to put yourself through a semester of college. The fact is is that we are here and, still, we do kind of believe that the music (on some ephemeral level) is the only thing that matters, but! we are going to just sidestep that for the remainder of this piece. In any case the auteur of that track was, is Dick Dale. The song: “Misirlou”, and it’s that song that he has become most well known for. It’s a great track to be sure and for all kinds of different reasons, like his utilization of non-western scales in rock music, or adapting the stylings of “Flight of The Bumble Bee” into his playing and doing that before anyone else even had a chance to grasp what the hell an electric guitar was or what it was capable of sounding like. More simply it could have been that no one beat the bitch of Rock and Roll up the likes of Dale. The hot-roddin’, wave ridin’ colon cancer survivin’, own leg nearly amputatin’, upside down guitar playin’, exotic animal raisin’, utterly fancinatin’ Dick Dale played his guitar. He played it loud. It’s name? “The Beast” and still to this day his music blows the God damned doors off. The doors of what? Well, we would put it to anyone who makes music to try and be as iconoclastically fun with their music while spiritually carving out their own idea of “sports” music. Do that and blow something up forty-nine times because of who you are and what you do. And if you can do that?, some blog in the future may be recalling you as “really excellent” or “great”, but not without mentioning the biggest ape-like grease monster of real American Rock and Roll! The legacy: Dick, “The King of The Surf Guitar”, Dale.

Right now we’d like to bring to your attention another, different “wild ride” of Dale’s: “Night Rider”. We have often mused about “Night Rider” in terms of asking how many lines of cocaine would you have to snort up your nose, how many bags of money would you have to run away from the cops with, need to experience how many high speed car accidents, or require how many switchblades to be pulled on you before you were capable of writing a song like “Night Rider”? In Dale’s case, all he had to do was grow up in Massachusetts, move to California, learn to surf and refrain from eating red meat. We may be busting the bubbles of most Rock enthusiasts or budding music trolls but Dick Dale has always been drug and alcohol free as well. That’s on top of not eating red meat. Now that we think about it, Dale and co. could have conceivably been the seeds of this freegan, anarchist, lame-o, neo-hippy tribe of youths we have in the States now. It’s most likely that he was not that though. He was just a red meat free, surfin’ rock and roller who never even dabbled in drugs.

“Never dabbled in drugs” and “rock and roll” maybe shouldn’t be written into the same sentence. It is such a square thing to say. But in Dale’s case maybe it isn’t. It’s one thing to say that the guy had dabbled in narcotics, speed and weed here or there. Or that he turned down drugs after he got busted holding. Or that only on the weekends did he smoke. All of these things would then contribute to “credit” for “times gone hard” and fit him in with the Rock mythos. It’s of an entirely different nature when someone can say that they have never, ever, as Catholics may put it, soiled the satin of their Jesus or defiled the temple of their flesh with any such thing. Be it the likes of dandelion wine or Satan’s Sassafras. So, when considering all the ovum of Rock and Roll that the seminal guitar diddler fertilized via Mr. Eliminator or Checkered Flag, the fertilized eggs who then became the impetus for those disgusting degenerate and futurelessly rebelling gutter punks, of which topsy-turvy-ed persona into something just about how much blow and heroine you could handle, not having done any drugs or not having drank any alcohol ever becomes pretty fucking cool. All that smack and horse may serve it’s purpose though in a similar respect. In any regard if this were in a continuum it operates like this: on one end it’s (finishes line of cocaine) “I do hella drugs, dude! You can’t stop me!”. On the other end it’s (takes a bite of salad) “I never really had any desire to smoke a marijuana cigarette”. Everything in between these two ends on this continuum is a big middle finger of who the fuck cares how much or how little of something you did. It takes just as much forbearance to say “no” to, and let’s be straight here, idiotic behaviors like drinking or smoking or sniffing glue as it does to indulge in them with the ferocity the likes of Charlie Sheen or the fabled Keith Richards? Dick Dale, Charlie Sheen, Keith Richards have all done mega cool stuff *. Does any of this “doing drugs”, “not doing drugs” thing really matter? Whatever the answer is, if being clean and not eating red meat can get you a song with the testicles of “Night Rider” than who the hell even cares?! We’re throwing out the A-1 and buying stock in Amy’s Brand vegan and vegetarian products as well as moving to the coast.

Thrum-picking itself out into the starting line of your nerves but hanging back on the record, “Night Rider” burst forth from Checkered Flag, Dale’s third record. His staple staccato picking is totally there to get you to “Gentlmen! Start your engines!”, but what is endearing about the track is not only it’s ability to put it all on the line, but it’s ability to maintain its blasting of you on all cylinders. Nothing is being held back yet all of the hallmarks of Dale are plain to see. They are there and the future of if those hallmarks are going to be able to bring you to your knees again is what’s been waged here. Dick Dale and The Del-tone’s dynamic of groovy rhythms, uptempo ride cymbals, bleeding saxophone, and the “wet” sound waving out of his overdriven amp, the way all of it, when assembled demands “the twist” out of you, is not changed. No matter what you could do to dissect it, you fail because Dick Dale, his guts, his biceps, the guitar, his method have always been thee drag race to end all other drag races. Or it’s the wave to crush all other riders. It’s a promise is what it is. And if that promise is ever retreated back on, it is to die forever more a yellow bellied, gutless turd. You always get that with Dick & his Del-tones. This isn’t magic though. The song’s not magnets neither. But, how does it work?

Emerging a decade out of McCarthyism, America is – what people say now as it being – at it’s height. There’s a car in every garage, meat’s what’s on the dinner table, 2.5 kids are what families’ are having these days and the threat of eternal disintegration at the hands of a terrifying development called The Bomb is ever imminent. Even in black an white the effects of seeing death-by-bomb has got to be nerve wracking. The reality would find you wherever your quiet moments could have been at that time. That is, it’s nerve wracking to see something as devastating as the bomb on television and then immediately understand that you are still, definitely alive while something as insidiously crushing as The Bomb is living in the world with you. Simple. Behemoth. Crushingly finite. Thee only-frightening kind of promise. You’d have to have moments of ‘we could be wiped out at anytime’, ‘my family could be wiped off the face of the earth forever’ or ‘If those Russkies think America is going down well then they got another thing coming’. Everything was totally getting noisy. That’s uh redundant and categorically untrue. Everything is, has always been getting more and more ridiculous or at risk of being lost forever. However the reverberation of the world, it’s news, movements, analysis, the weather, it’s wars and having all of them blasting out of new televisions and better radios were most likely exacerbating it all. What’s that got to do with diamond hard guitar fiddlin’ and blowing up weak, pathetic amplifiers? Maybe nothing. Most definitely not everything. But for sure at least a little something that the era can be called into account for flavoring.

After so many years of living with imminent fear of mutually reassured destruction and the kind of destruction that could happen over the potential slip of a button, by a code toting madman gone way mad, or just done dead by “because”, it’s certainly not a stretch to say people would just want to relax. Lie on a beach. Drink a beer. Watch the tube. Dance. Party. Get laid. Get really really really laid. They’d want to ride motorcycles at bullet-like speed – no helmet , try stuff, live fast and then, maybe – hopefully, die young. Die young and beautiful. Do it all instead of living in fear. Well, we are getting ahead of the times by this “live fast, die young” point and Dale’s music doesn’t want to be a soundtrack to die to. We think. Actually we know. The mistake of believing people that take calculated risks like surfing, of which appear to be insane and pointless at the time, do not actually want to die! Believe us or not. Before all the bad apples wanted to start dying, unrealistically we may add, “Night Rider” becomes so much more autobiographical than it could have been intended to be. That’s what we call the advantageous mistake. One in which the entire universe wins. Hopefully, (we think) without sounding idiotic, this whole historical analysis of surf music’s era, but more importantly the guy responsible for bringing you the jewels of it, is only a small percentage responsible for why we have “Night Rider”.

In the end Richard Anthony Monsour, the Dick Dale of these United States of America surfed with hard thunder and slid his fingers over one thousand nine hundred and fifty years of musical evolution, and with that ripped a hole the size of an ocean into living with fear. His music is what’s important and so are other things – like this.

“Night Rider” bubbles up into the psyche of any person in a post-modern world who can relate. It kicks over the cauldron of “what it all means” while popping a wheelie over the corpse of your father. It stops suddenly after the opening where the leather clad dead man of your mind yells at you, “Hey! Are you gonna just stand their like an ‘L7’ or are you gonna hop on this ride?!”

“W-w-w-w-w,” you regain,”where are you guh-guh-going?” He’s a demon!

“Into Hell.” Whoa. “You comin’or not,” he yells out over the sweaty engine of your doom.

“Oh-o-oh kay.”

The drum fill within the first moments of “Night Rider” begins, and then peels out as you hop on the back (no seat belt on a motorcycle) and you hang on for dear life. This one is called “Night Rider”. It’s a one minute and forty-eight second drag race through a new, fist wielding generation of America in the early sixties who did the only thing they knew how – not die.

Kids were not dying so much so that some of them actually started dying later via heroine, speed, and even pathetically (sorry but it’s true, Bon) by choking on vomit. Sometimes the vomit wasn’t even theirs. The bomb didn’t end up taking them. Death was wrenched from cold grey hands. Surf Rock took it away. It’s too bad though, only a few years after it started these punks misguidedly held freedom from death and wielded it like a false flag in the form of hobos kicking a broken, dead stallion. That’s the bad wrap. The point is is that these other so-called degenerate gearheads, Dale’s generation, medalled to the pedal – or is it pedalled to the metal? – the throttle of what it was to be an American youth, the surfing, unafraid cowboys in search of a new ways to live, new ways to think, another direction to push in, and in doing so creating new ways to enjoy yourself, your life. Some things got destroyed. Again, we’d say that that message was way lost too. And even Dale himself, after writing the grinder of “Night Rider” retired from music in 1965 for nearly twenty years. Things risked, gains made, races lost. We only can hope that in this new millennium things get handled like “Night Rider” sounds. By ‘things’ we mean music….OK! we also mean a ton of other things too. Say what you will about the musical and idea landscape here in the US, the world, more than fifty years after the fact, “Night Rider” is something to be proud of. It’s energetic, fast, and stupid almost, but there hain’t much that can compete.

*Charlie Sheen was tits when he played Rick Vaughn in the film “Major League”, ok!