STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

By: Lucy Sante
October 17, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn. Also check out our proto-punk playlist (a work in progress) at Spotify.

THE COUNT FIVE | “PSYCHOTIC REACTION” | 1966

You really have to perceive “Psychotic Reaction” in its native habitat, Top 40 radio in 1966. As the motormouth DJ fills every second between songs with overexcited patter, he plays the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out” (maniacal cackle sets off drum barrage and primal three-chord riff already being played by every single combo in white teenage America), then a commercial for National Speedway (maniacal cackle by gravedigger voice teases the listener while stentorian voice announces drivers by nicknames and engine sizes), then a three-second clip from “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haa” by Napoleon XIV (maniacal cackle). Then he launches into “Psychotic Reaction,” in which the lead guitar supplies the maniacal cackle.

The lyrics go, roughly: “I’m bummed out because you’ve been mean (girl), so I’m going to have a medical episode.” This is declaimed in couplets, but instead of a chorus the singer drops out and the band lurches into a double-time boogie, a freight train led by a choogling mouth harp. As Lester Bangs points out in a famous piece, the number is really just a variant on the Yardbirds’ “I’m a Man” (and its signature opening riff is lifted from Johnny Rivers’s “Seventh Son”). Every garage band was doing the Yardbirds that year, as the Yardbirds themselves tirelessly played Catholic high schools in New Jersey. But “I’m a Man” is itself just a variant on Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy,” and anyway the point is that “Psychotic Reaction” takes apart the conventional blues-boogie of its inspirations in order to enact the breakdown. After the word “reaction,” the singer shouts, “And it feels like this,” whereupon the harmonica becomes his screaming voice as the band — the world — hurtles into overdrive.

Teenagers could feel what it was like to go psycho — they felt it every day. In the cultural gender division of the time, girls responded by writing sad poems while boys wore Rat Fink T-shirts and drove souped-up junkers as if they were immortal. “Psychotic Reaction” was a goofus anthem that went along with STP stickers and Maltese-cross pendants and garrison belts with the buckle worn on the hip. Some of those boys would go on to be gearheads, some bikers, some junkies, some battlefield corpses — and some of them hippies, at least for a minute. The Count Five, meanwhile, broke up because they all went to college. Nine or so years later Television covered the song live, often opening their sets with it. Tom Verlaine knew what it was like to be a psycho teenager, and he loved the tempo switch and knew that it was really intended to be a cadenza passage in which Richard Lloyd could frantically chop and he could go crazy with the tremolo bar. And that opening riff no longer belonged to Johnny Rivers.

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STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mandy Keifetz on The Trashmen’s SURFIN’ BIRD | Nicholas Rombes on Yoko Ono’s MOVE ON FAST | David Cantwell on ? and the Mysterians’ 96 TEARS | James Parker on The Modern Lovers’ SHE CRACKED | Lynn Peril on The Pleasure Seekers’ WHAT A WAY TO DIE | Lucy Sante on The Count Five’s PSYCHOTIC REACTION | Jonathan Lethem on The Monkees’ YOUR AUNTIE GRIZELDA | Adam McGovern on ELP’s BRAIN SALAD SURGERY | Mimi Lipson on The Shaggs’ MY PAL FOOT FOOT | Eric Weisbard on Frances Faye’s FRANCES AND HER FRIENDS | Annie Zaleski on Suzi Quatro’s CAN THE CAN | Carl Wilson on The Ugly Ducklings’ NOTHIN’ | Josh Glenn on Gillian Hill’s TUT, TUT, TUT, TUT… | Mike Watt on The Stooges’ SHAKE APPEAL | Peter Doyle on The Underdogs’ SITTING IN THE RAIN | Stephanie Burt on Pauline Oliveros’s III | Marc Weidenbaum on Ornette Coleman’s WE NOW INTERRUPT FOR A COMMERCIAL | Anthony Miller on Eno’s NEEDLES IN THE CAMEL’S EYE | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sonics’ STRYCHNINE | David Smay on The New York Dolls’ HUMAN BEING | Michael Grasso on the 13th Floor Elevators’ YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME | Holly Interlandi on Death’s ROCK’N’ROLL VICTIM | Elina Shatkin on Bobby Fuller’s I FOUGHT THE LAW | Brian Berger on The Mothers of Invention’s WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE? | Peggy Nelson on The Kingsmen’s LOUIE LOUIE.

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

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