I hate to disagree with Thurston Moore, but contrary to the Sonic Youth guitarist’s bold assertion, The Memphis Goons are not a “fantastic American rock-and-roll story.” The Goons, whose newest collection of songs PEPPO is now available for download at iTunes, were a smart, exceptionally talented ’60s/’70s-era rock-and-roll band that nobody knew or cared about. In other words, their story is fairly typical, and it goes something like this: Suburban kids make fantastic, ahead-of-its time (and/or unfashionably retro) music in their parents’ garages and basements and nobody notices.
Nearly 30 years after the tracks were originally recorded, Teenage BBQ, the Goons’ first collection of lo-fi home recordings, were released on Shangri-La, a small independent Memphis record label. Still, other than a few critics and obscurity collectors, nobody paid much attention. Well, except for Robert Hull, the former Creem contributor and executive producer for Time-Life Music who listed the Memphis Goons as having created the third-best garage-rock sounds ever — after the Kingsmen and the Sonics — in an essay on “original punks” that was collected in the Rolling Stone-published book Alt-Rock-a-Rama. Hull, an original punk who sometimes uses the aliases “Robot Hull” and “Xavier Tarpit”, grew up in Whitehaven, a Memphis suburb, and is a founding member of the band.
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