As with any heavy rock genre to emerge after the mid-1970s, shoegaze music has roots planted in the 1960s. British shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine, A.R. Kane, The Cocteau Twins, and their 1980s contemporaries were never the first to mix dissonance and atonal noise with classic radio-friendly hooks and psych pop bliss. Most of the genre’s earliest proponents emerged in the U.S. during the Vietnam Era. Here’s a brief guide to the shoegaze genre’s primordial years:
"This Love Of Ours" by The Fantastic Dee Jays (1965)
This trio from the Pittsburgh suburbs made a series of charming Beatle-esque 7”s that were among the first popular British Invasion influenced recordings to come from their region. They preceded these with a 1965 debut single, a surprising allusion of things to come. The Sherry Records release “This Love Of Ours” b/w “Apache” is a stark crossbreed of noise music bombast and teen pop. The B-side is a crude rip through the Jerry Lordan warhorse, but side A is where the real shoegaze gold lurks. “This Love Of Ours” radiates with overloaded distortion, awkward echo FX, dissonant maudlin vocals, and crashing cymbals all droning along narcotically at a snail’s pace. If David Lynch ever tried to produce a torch song for a teen pop crooner on a $2 budget it would’ve sounded exactly like this.
Towards the end of 1966 The Dee Jays got bored with their wholesome boy band image. They changed their name, added a few members, bought a pile of giant amps and fuzz pedals, and made punk history by forming hardcore’s earliest recorded group, The Swamp Rats.
"Tryin’ To Come Back" by The Plastic Menagerie (1966)
From punk to electronica to DIY folk, the rural U.S. has long been known as a nexus for globally influential extreme music in all forms. Even the often Anglophilic shoegaze genre can be added to the list of sonic innovations born in America’s backwoods.
For many years “Tryin’ To Come Back” was misidentified as a West Virginia recording, but recently it was discovered to be the creation of a teenage sextet from Shelbyville, Tennessee, only about an hour south of Nashville. The Plastic Menagerie were originally called The Roustabouts and changed their name shortly before releasing this prescient noise pop dirge. “Tryin To Come Back” could’ve been a sad Byrds-like folk rock ballad, but thanks to a mastering accident or a low-budget attempt to create a “trippy” sound through intentionally overdriven production, this song predicts the speaker shredding work of My Bloody Valentine and Mercury Rev by more than a decade.
The center piece of “Tryin To Come Back”—the one noise element that makes this an essential thread in the early shoegaze tapestry—is the painful cranked-into-the-red sound of a ride cymbal. Its static blare buries nearly everything else, turning the entire recording into a melodic puzzle. It’s a fuzzed-out death peal for traditional rock that makes The Jesus & Mary Chain’s records seem like cheery bubblegum by comparison.
Garage rock fanatics and 1960s rock completists have celebrated this song’s important status as a prime piece of moody teenbeat. Consequently, original 7” vinyl copies of “Tryin To Come Back” are hot in the collector’s market. The rest of the world can save money by enjoying the song on the archival various artists compilation Last Of The Garage Punk Unknowns volume 7. The complete recordings of The Plastic Menagerie (including “Hold Your Baby Close,” the mod-blasted A-side of “Tryin…”) can be heard on Psychedelic States: West Virginia In The 60’s.
"Blue Jay Way" by The Beatles (1967)
Zoned-out late-1960s psychedelia has always been a major inspiration for all kinds of alternative rock artists, but one psych-pop touchstone in particular stands as a blueprint for the entire shoegaze atmosphere and attitude. “Blue Jay Way” is a lesser known cut from The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album. It was written by George Harrison as he was staring out over a fog drenched Los Angeles sprawl while shaking off jet lag at a house in the Hollywood Hills. It’s the kind song that could only have been written and sung from the point of view of someone not quite asleep and not quite awake, a state that seems present in 90 percent of all shoegaze tracks. Unlike the colorful whimsy of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” “Dear Prudence” and other lysergic Beatles landmarks, “Blue Jay Way” features hallucinogenic lyrics and dissonant melodies that bog down the band like a hangover. Thick drones of distortion and tape manipulation transform the relatively few instruments on “Blue Jay Way” into a tense yet lush soundscape. Early-1990s shoegaze testaments from Flying Saucer Attack, Stereolab, and Sebadoh would bring this “less is more” approach to new heights of ear-shattering euphoria.