Six Hours a Night, Seven Nights a Week: How the Monks Subtracted Their Way to the First Punk Record

The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art concept. It was a workload.

A Factory Shift in the GI Bars

Before they were the Monks they were the Torquays, a covers band working the GI bars around their base, playing whatever was in the charts. Walther Niemann and Karl-H Remy, the two designers who spotted them, gave them the look and the framework. What the band did with it was the part nobody could have designed. Between 1965 and 1966 they played six hours a night, seven nights a week, with an extra two hour matinee on Sundays. That is not a tour schedule, it is a factory shift, and it is the reason the album sounds the way it does.

Under that kind of repetition you stop adding and start removing. Bassist Eddie Shaw described the method plainly years later: bass and drum patterns laid down first, everything else built on top, and then the stripping begins. Drums with no cymbals except for accents. Single distorted bass notes on the beat. Banjo chords chosen because the sound was hard and trashy. Guitar used for its feedback rather than its notes. Organ playing beats instead of melodies. Every instrument in the band was reclassified as a rhythm instrument, including the ones that are not.

The Banjo Was a Percussion Instrument

The banjo is the detail everyone remembers, and it is worth being precise about it. Dave Day did not play folk banjo. He chorded a banjo guitar like a guitar, amplified it by putting microphones inside the body, and hit it. The gut strings clacked. It occupies the same position in the Monks that the electric jug occupies in the 13th Floor Elevators, an instrument nobody asked for, doing a job no conventional instrument could do as badly and therefore as well.

Twenty Eight Years to Cross the Atlantic

Black Monk Time was cut in Cologne in November 1965 with Jimmy Bowien producing, and Polydor put it out in March 1966. Twelve songs, under thirty minutes. It sold nothing. The single, Complication backed with Oh, How to Do Now, sold nothing either. By 1967 the band were growing their hair back, and a planned tour of Vietnam collapsed when members went missing days before the flight. That was the end.

The delay is the part that should interest anyone who cares how a canon gets built. Polydor did not release the album in the United States until 1994, on the grounds that it was too experimental and too blunt about Vietnam. Twenty eight years. Henry Rollins and Rick Rubin reissued it in 1997, Light in the Attic in 2009, and by then the liner notes read like a roll call: Iggy Pop, Jack White, Mark E. Smith, Lenny Kaye, Krist Novoselic. The Fall covered three of its songs. Alexis Petridis has pointed at Roger Johnston’s drumming as an early sketch of the motorik pulse that krautrock would formalise a few years later, in the same country, with none of the same people.

What the Room Taught Them

There is a lesson buried in the schedule that has nothing to do with 1966. The Monks did not arrive at minimalism through theory. They arrived through six hours a night in rooms where soldiers threw chairs and the military police used tear gas, an environment that punishes anything decorative and rewards anything that holds a room. Shaw put it as a matter of tension: take something far enough that the audience gets nervous waiting for the change. Plenty of bands now record an album without ever finding out which parts survive contact with a hostile room, because they never play one.

Black Monk Time is not a lost classic because it was ignored. It was ignored because it was made under conditions almost nobody else was working under, by a band with no path back to a normal career and no reason to soften anything. The costume got the attention. The shift work made the record.