Bands I Liked As A Teenager: Le Shok.

Everyone knows the music you listen to as a teenager is formative, to the point that most people refuse to acknowledge anything that comes after. This is the first part of a new series about my own rose-tinted nostalgia. But hey, at least I'm not a baby boomer.

Le Shok were the it band for a very brief moment in the twilight of the 20th century. They were the rare band that managed to win favor from multiple punk factions, uniting stodgy garage turkeys with white-belted screamojugend and gracing the covers of both MRR and HeartattaCk. And like any band that got a lot of buzz, they attracted surly skeptics who thought that they sucked and/or questioned their heterosexuality.

In a pre-9/11, pre-Facebook era, the reigning epithet was "scenester", a term leveled at any kind of fashion-forward, style-conscious punk. And Le Shok were prime targets, since they looked like Ziggy Stardust's sketchy cousin from Huntington Beach.

But there's a big difference between the scenesters of yesteryear and the hipsters everyone loves to hate: unlike the beardos and urban beekeepers we're all familiar with, the guys in Le Shok actually had good record collections. Today's urban dandies take cues from Le Shok without even realizing it, but the music they listen to couldn't be more different. This was a band formed by bin-digging record store employees who listened to bands like The Monorchid and Teengenerate, and they came from a completely different world than bands like this.

Plus, you have to look at it in context: at the time, dressing like a coked-up extra from the Zodiac movie was a new and interesting idea. (So was using the French article "le", for that matter.)

Like the Velvet Underground, not that many people heard or saw them, but within a few years imitators were everywhere. In this ancient Pitchfork interview the Load Records guy draws a line between Le Shok and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then the toast of the clueless music press; this blogger connects the dots to later hype bands like Mika Miko and No Age, and even credits Le Shok with kickstarting the vinyl revival.

Sounds crazy, right? I don't know: I'm in the oldest bracket of Generation Y (a prime demographic for buying endless reissues of records that sucked to begin with) and the first record I ever bought was a Le Shok 7".

A band like Crystal Castles also never would've happened without Le Shok, who rehabilitated both playing synthesizers and acting like an asshole, two behaviors which had fallen into disrepute since the advent of grunge. And while The Locust and many other Moog-wielding Romulans of the era sounded like Crossed Out crossed with a '50s sci-fi movie, Le Shok wrote livewire pop tunes about S&M and Vicodin, heaped abuse on their fans, and sounded like they never practiced.

In short, they were fucking punk, at a time when punk bands that weren't afraid to be punk bands were in very short supply. Like a blob of white phosphorous, they burned fast and bright: almost all of their records came out in the span of just a couple years, and then they vanished without a trace. In 1999 alone, they put out three 7"s and an LP, the latter featuring some of the very best cover art of its era.

Some of their snotty singles sounded like they were written on the fly, but there's still no shortage of hits ("Electric Digits", "She Prefers Whips", "Telephone Disasters") and the full-length just absolutely slays from start to finish.

There's also a lot to be said for record sleeves you'd actually be afraid of showing to the wrong person—a rare thing these days.

I was lucky enough to see one of Le Shok's few shows outside of California, on a package tour with The Locust and a bunch of godawful spock rock bands who are now completely forgotten by time.

It's still one of the most memorable sets I've ever seen. Hot Rod Todd—who I should also mention is seriously like 7 feet tall—berated the longhair sound guy for failing to procure drugs for him ("I pretended to like speed metal for you, asshole!") and slapped a kid in the front for clapping too enthusiastically. They played for about 10 minutes and sounded sublimely sloppy. It felt like time-travelling to The Masque in 1978 and watching the greatest lost Dangerhouse band of all time; I half-expected to see Black Randy or Claude Bessy bouncing around in front of the stage.

Here's a clip of Le Shok stumbling through a song and talking shit in every direction, with cameos by members of The Locust.



Le Shok were more exciting than like 80% of all the bands I've ever seen, because the ugly truth is that most bands are actually incredibly boring live. The best ones offer something that you can't get from just sitting at home and listening to the records—not every band has to be Gwar or Gordon Solie Motherfuckers, but live music is partly theater, and all the best live bands recognize this to some degree. It's a performance, after all, not a recital.

As Joey Juvenile told the OC Register: "There were some nights where we were so sober it wasn't even Le Shok...You might as well have just listened to the record." But as Todd also notes in the same article:

Some people just missed the point of it...All they expected was some crazy show where stuff gets broken, somebody gets punched, something silly like that. But it wasn't just to make a mess. We played music that I was really proud of—I have no regrets.

Amen. There was a lot more to this band than hype, fights, and skinny ties. The records hold up, and the shows are still worth talking about 15 years later. Can you really ask for anything more?

* A note on names: Le Shok had some of the greatest punk names ever, e.g. "Over The Counter Rusty". I always thought Hot Rod Todd was actually kind of a weak moniker, but he more than made up for it with the name he used in his next band: "Nancy Manhands".