What was the garage rock revival?

A stretch of roughly 2000 to 2004 when the music press, mostly British, decided that guitar bands with the word The in front of their name were a movement. The White Stripes, the Hives and the Strokes were the three names that carried it. The underground scene it was named after had been running without interruption since the 1980s and did not notice much.

Were the Strokes a garage rock band?

Not really. Is This It is a fine record and its ancestors are Television and the Velvet Underground, which is New York art rock rather than anything you would call garage. They were filed under the revival because the timing and the leather jackets fitted, not because the records sound like the Sonics.

Did the garage rock revival do any lasting good?

Yes, indirectly. It sent a lot of teenagers backwards through record collections towards the Gories, the Sonics and Nuggets, and it gave reissue labels a market that had been thin. The bands who benefited most were mostly not the ones on magazine covers.

The Garage Rock Revival: What Actually Happened

The garage rock revival was a press event with three very good records attached. That is not a put-down of the records. It is a description of what actually happened, which is that a music industry looking for a story after a decade of something else found four or five bands with similar haircuts and declared a movement, while the scene they had borrowed the word from carried on exactly as before.

We can put a number on the gap. Sixteen underground radio shows are documented in our archive, 651 episode pages recovered with 9,747 track lines between them, from a period beginning in 2005. Search that whole record for the three bands the revival is named after and you get this: the White Stripes appear twice. The Hives do not appear. The Strokes do not appear.

What the press was actually describing

Around 2000 to 2004, largely driven by the British weeklies, a set of unrelated bands got welded into a scene. The White Stripes from Detroit. The Hives from Fagersta in Sweden, who had been going since 1993 and were nobody’s new band. The Strokes from New York. Then the Vines from Sydney, the Datsuns and the D4 from New Zealand, the Von Bondies, the Mooney Suzuki, and a definite article epidemic that took about five years to clear.

Very little of it was garage rock in any sense a record dealer would accept. The Strokes descend from Television and the Velvet Underground. The Hives owe more to Swedish punk and the Nomads than to Nuggets. What the bands genuinely had in common was that they were loud, short, guitar-based and not the thing that had dominated the charts for the previous decade, and that was enough for a headline.

The White Stripes were the real thing, though

The one band who came out of this world rather than being placed in it. Jack and Meg White’s first single came out on Italy Records, a Detroit label, and their early albums went to Sympathy for the Record Industry, which had been putting out the Mummies and half the American underground for years. Jim Diamond recorded them at Ghetto Recorders. They covered Bo Diddley and Robert Johnson and Dolly Parton and did not treat any of it as a costume.

The most telling detail is on Elephant in 2003, the record that made them enormous, where the closing duet is sung with Holly Golightly. She had come up through Thee Headcoatees in Billy Childish’s Medway circle, and she is one of the most widely played artists in our entire archive, in four separate shows. The two worlds were connected. The press just told the story with only one of them in it.

Detroit, which was a real scene

The city had something the revival narrative was too impatient to explain. The Gories formed there in 1986, two guitars and no bass, and broke up in 1992 having sold very little and altered everything downstream. Mick Collins then built the Dirtbombs with two drummers and two bassists. The Detroit Cobras did nothing but obscure soul and R&B covers, and did them better than the originals about a third of the time. Bantam Rooster, the Demolition Doll Rods, the Ghetto Recorders room, Italy Records.

That is what a scene looks like. It existed for fifteen years before anybody outside Michigan filed a report on it, and the reporting mostly arrived at the moment it was winding down.

The underground that never needed reviving

Here is the part the story leaves out entirely. While three bands were on magazine covers, the thing they were supposedly reviving was having one of its strongest decades.

In the Red, Goner, Crypt, Norton and Sympathy were all operating. Greg Cartwright came out of the Oblivians and started Reigning Sound, who made better records than most of the bands on the covers. The Black Lips formed in Atlanta in 1999 and spent the decade getting banned from places. King Khan and BBQ turned a Montreal friendship into a catalogue. Guitar Wolf kept going. The Mummies came back periodically to remind people what budget rock meant.

And Jay Reatard, out of Memphis, made more good records between 1998 and his death in 2010 than the entire revival press cycle produced. His band Angry Angles, with Alix Brown, was played by four separate shows in our archive with ten plays between them. That is more airtime than the White Stripes, the Hives, the Strokes, the Vines and the Datsuns received in that data put together, which is zero plus two.

What the numbers do and do not prove

Absence from a playlist is not a verdict on a band. It tells you where a particular set of hosts pointed their attention, and it comes with conditions worth stating.

These shows started in 2005, when the hype had already crested, so nobody was obliged to play catch-up. Underground programmers actively avoid what the mainstream has adopted, and some of that zero is contrarianism rather than taste. Eighty episode pages were never captured at all and are missing from the search, and two of the largest shows have playlists we could not parse. None of that changes the shape of the finding: a scene had no interest in the bands the world assumed it was thrilled about.

The parallel case is worth reading alongside this one, because the same pattern ran through instrumental music at the same time: the surf rock revival covers a genre that has now been revived so many times the word has stopped meaning anything.

What it left behind

Something real, in the end. A large number of people worked backwards from White Blood Cells to the Gories, and from the Gories to the Sonics, and stayed. Reissue labels found buyers. Bands who had been playing to forty people for a decade got to play to two hundred for a couple of years.

What it did not do was change the machinery. The labels that mattered before 2000 mattered after it. The records that got played on underground radio were still small-run singles by bands nobody’s editor had heard of. That is the durable finding here, and it is why we would rather rank bands by evidence than by profile: see the best garage punk bands for what sixteen hosts actually reached for, and the history of garage punk for the sixty years the revival was a four-year sliver of.

The archive itself is documentation reconstructed from Internet Archive captures of a network that no longer runs, and its history sets out where the record runs out. This site is independently owned and not affiliated with that network, its hosts or its contributors.