Girls in the Garage, Vol. 1

Lenny Kaye might not have expected it to happen but a downside of so much of the compilations that followed in the wake of his famed Nuggets compilation implicitly argued one key thing his own work inadvertently suggested: that 60s American garage and early psych rock, however defined, was the province of dudes only. The anonymous compiler of the excellent sounding bootleg series Girls In The Garage was having none of it, as was clear in their enjoyable liner notes, and the debut effort in 1987 was an absolute treat and a half. Starting with the spirited harmonica-tinged kick of Denise and Co.’s “Take Me As I Am,” the various selections showed that the women of the scene often gave as good as they got from all the guys, though not without a few songs that were more straightforwardly lovelorn. (Further, the involvement of Kim Fowley on the last two entries doesn’t help, especially in retrospect.) With plenty of girl-group-adjacent sass adding to the proceedings throughout, there’s also a solid musical range at work, from the nasty guitar snarl of the Luv’d Ones’s “Up Down Sue” to the stop-start fun of the Belles’s “Come Back” (pity their gender-flipped rework of “Gloria,” “Melvin,” didn’t make the cut) to the bright edge of the Bittersweets’ “Hurtin’ Kind” to the jittery “The Girl He Needs,” coolly sung by Lydia Marcelle.