Your California Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week

The Count Five, from San Jose, are the archetypal mid-60's garage rock 'n roll story. Five California suburban teenagers who picked up instruments trying to sound like British rockers who were trying to sound like black Southern blues men and then coming up with something new, raw and in it's own genre we now call garage rock. Hardly before the band even had a name "Psychotic Reaction" was a hit song in 1966 and the band was signed to a record label who rushed them into the studio to quickly write and record an album full of mediocre songs that were not nearly on the level of their single. By early 1968, the members of The Count Five wisely decided going college was a better bet than to vainly pursue rock stardom and they called it quits. If not for being preserved in the memory of true and great record geeks like critic Lester Bangs and Lenny Kaye, who compiled the Nuggets compilations of garage rock, the Count Five would have been lost to history and never passed to the younger generations of record geeks like myself.