voila_la_scorie When it comes to sixties garage rock and electric blues, you often have to dig around to find evidence of proto-metal. I've recently been listening to quite a few garage bands from the U.S. and freak beat bands from the U.K., and though there are some excellent songs with loud guitars, power chords and distortion, for the most part the music is very similar to The Who's power pop material of their early years. It probably rocked on stage but comes across as pretty lightweight in the studio.

One band that made its way into my CD collection only the other day is The Misunderstood. This album here begins with six tracks that the band recorded in London in 1966. As I listened for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. This music was from 1966? Well, yes, the recording sound and guitar sounds and everything else sounds like '66, but the style of music does not. To say that The Misunderstood were so far out in their own field is no understatement. Comparisons have been made to The Yardbirds and it's true that both their older blues music and their 1966 recordings resemble The Yardbirds. The Misunderstood began as a dedicated blues band with Glenn Ross Campbell's steel guitar giving the band a sound that the British Invasion bands didn't have. The second half of this disc includes seven songs recorded in 1965 that clearly reflect the sounds of the early Yardbirds with Eric Clapton. In particular, the band's take on The Yardbird's "I'm not Talking" is a fantastic rendition with speedy and loud guitar playing that abruptly stops and becomes laid back swaying blues before suddenly changing into a more aggressive and speedy version the the original song which was gritty and rough to begin with. (A longer version of this song appears on another album.)

Yes, The Misunderstood proved themselves to be masters of blues, and one account mentioned on the website tells of how they were threatened by a group of young white men accusing the band of being "nigga lovas" after they emerged from a black bar after having wrapped up a show. Just as things came to standoff, about twenty young black men came out of the bar and surrounded the band. Pulling out pipes and knives, they said they were ready to take on any honkies that were causing trouble to their white friends.

So, the music from 1965 is very Clapton era Yardbirds with the greatest distinction being Rick Brown's white soul vocals (that someone said sound like Eric Burdon had swallowed Howlin' Wolf whole!) and Glenn Ross Campbell's steel guitar. But the real treat is the first six tracks.

Though only two minutes long on average ("I Can Take You to the Sun" is 3:38 because it has two parts), the songs are at the very least as interesting as any of the Jeff Beck era Yardbirds with regards to aggressive guitar playing. And like The Yardbirds there is the use of exotic scales derivative of India and the East except that for me I find them to sound almost gimmicky with The Yardbirds; here they fit in quite naturally. But more than that is the overall use of distortion, power chords, gruff and shouted vocals, crashing symbols, and rhythm changes within songs. I had recently been considering how garage rock was separated from early metal by its simplicity - two-minute songs and a simple riff - versus the often more complex nature of metal compositions. But here we have a band who in 1966 were already employing mounting tension, crashes of power chords, abrupt changes to slower, atmospheric music with steel guitar, and back to harder hitting music. "I Can Take You to the Sun" mixes lighter psychedelic rock with heavier and halfway through switches to an simple acoustic piece with vocals. It's the kind of stuff that wouldn't really start to appear until late 1968 or 1969. At times I feel this truly is a very early proto-type for heavy metal. There are a few moments when even singer Rick Brown sounds a bit like the great grandfather (in a pop music time scale) of Glen Danzig. And you'd be amazed how well that steel guitar works with heavy psych.

The sound quality is surprisingly good, as good as many recordings intended for pop world domination in '66. The band was under the guidance and support of their manager, John Peel, who would later become a famous DJ and a host of British music TV programs. The earlier blues recordings are not so clear, however, having been taken from the only extant acetate pressing. No matter. If it's blues you want, there are other albums that have more of The Misunderstood's early recordings while they were still in California.

It's interesting to note that the British addition to the band, rhythm guitarist and song-writer Tony Hill, later went on to form High Tide, who are sometimes considered a precursor to progressive metal. The Misunderstood lost Rick Brown to the army draft (and what a story he has to tell after that of fleeing to India, becoming the disciple of a swami, hiding out at an old ruby mine, and discovering a book that relates precious stones to the nine Vedic planets - you can read snippets from the book on the Misunderstood web site). A new version of the band recorded an album in 1969 that features some really heavy guitar sound, and once again a version of the band formed in the early eighties and recorded some hard rock / punk tracks.

I rate this album four stars but this is for the first six tracks. The blues tracks are good and all but the London recordings are the real gems when it comes to proto-metal. I have yet to hear anything like this from 1966 and for all the elements present here in these songs I recommend fans of really early heavy music, heavy psychedelic rock, acid rock, and basically loud and slamming sixties guitar rock to give this a listen.

One final note, the iTunes version of this album has only the seven songs from 1965. From what I have seen, this CD is the only Misunderstood album that has these six tracks from London, 1966.