Tuesday Tuneage
The Mummies - "(You Must Fight To Live) On The Planet Of The Apes"
1993

One reason why the Children of Nuggets box, while fine, didn't live up to my mind's hype was that it largely lacked the swaggering/stumbling we-wanna-be-Stones/Yardbirds menace of so many of the bands on the original Nuggets box set. Children of Nuggets substituted "psychedelic and pop sixties" for "garage" and while these sounds are pretty, there wasn't enough of basement brewings like "Pabst Blue Ribbon" by Untamed Youth.

Another true garage band to show up on Children of Nuggets were the self-proclaimed "Kings of Budget Rock," the Mummies. They dressed in mummy costumes made of Ace bandages, refused to release their music on compact disc, played through the crappiest used lo-fi equipment they could find, and proudly bashed out garage rock that on recorded tracks sounded like it had been dubbed from tape to tape to tape, the kind of trashy great stuff that was called "punk rock" back in the sixties. As Mark Deming says at Allmusic.com:

Four guys in mummy outfits bash out crude '60s-style rock about beer, babes, and open hostility on battered gear which was doubtless discarded by tone-deaf teenagers who got over their 15-minute delusion of possible future rock stardom in 1966 ... At a time when a lot of garage rock bands sounded like they were drowning in a sea of paisley and nehru affectation, the Mummies flipped the whole scene the bird.

If these jokers had come up in the last ten years I would have scoffed, but they thrashed around in the eighties-into-nineties years making them likely my age, so of course I dig 'em. Then again, I only got into them ten days ago.

Oh ... the song? Gloriously loud and dumb and the first few times I heard it on Little Steven's Sirius station I hated it, but then suddenly I loved it big-time. Things like that happen sometimes.