what the cool kids listened to before punk rock came to town, part one

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Folks, before punk rock leaked out of the surrounding universe like a glob of very hot metal - the kind produced when welding or alternatively, by cranking the shit out of your mains and destroying expensive musical equipment on stage - and coelesced gloriously and profoundly in albuquerque new mexico (where it continues to dwell perpetually like steel is designed to do), local rocanrol music lovers were known to gather in the desert with transistor radios and the am philco receivers of their parents' abominably huge automobiles and tune into faraway places like Ciudad Juarez or Denver Colorado to get their nightly quotient of those heady nuggets of tunage which drove their souls past ennui and into the blissfully rhythmical unknown.

Actually, it wasn't like that at all. I just wanted to experiment a little. Generate a mythos and all that. Because you know the story. There's been rocanrol played in this town for what I reckon must be about sixty years. I'll prove that to you all someday, but since I can't get the god damned T.A.R.D.I.S. to go back past nineteen hundred and sixty four until i install a new sub-temporal modulator, I'll tell you all about the rocanrol scene that was cooking up a storm in Burque during the later portion of that same decade.

There is already a lot that has been written about those halcyon days, mostly by one of the scene's progenitors. His name is Dick Stewart and he and his mates had a band called the Knights. Heavily influenced by the instrumental surf rock that was seeping onto the playlists at KQEO, the Knights evolved into a proto-psychedelic band as la musica de Califas came to rule youthful imaginations in the west and southwest.

Later on in the game, they changed their name to King Richard and the Knights. Here's what they sounded like in the year called nineteen hundred and sixty six:



Stewart further contributed to the local scene by publishing a seminal music zine that still has life and is planting seeds today. Most significantly, Stewart started a recording studio called Lance Records. He used the electronic technology of the age to document and showcase home grown psychedelic rocanrol, releasing records by space pioneers like The Kreeg and Lincoln Street Exit.

If you wanna know more about all of that, check out The Lance online. It's the perfect means of remotely viewing and hearing the authentic voice of Burque's rocanrol past, since you aren't privileged with the same awesome devices available to a Time Lord, and all that other sci-fi mumbo jumbo that I am known for espousing.

In the meantime and while you are clicking away, here are two of my favorite recordings from the archives of Lance Records: The Kreeg performing Impressin' and Lincoln Street Exit's recording called The Bummer.