Needle Drop: The Remains, “Hang on Sloopy”

“They were how you told a stranger about Rock ’n’ Roll.”
Jon Landau, Crawdaddy, January, 1967

Not all mid-’60s garage rock bands were created equal. More specifically, not all mid-’60s garage rock bands were Boston’s in-house firebrands, The Remains. Name-checked by future hometown legends the Real Kids, covered by Aussie pub rock lords the Sunnyboys, and the subject of a nigh-unfindable documentary narrated by Peter Wolf, The Remains may be the ultimate band’s band.

Formed in ’64 and fronted by lead howler/songwriter/guitarist Barry Tashian—who, in one of rock ’n’ roll’s more bewildering plot twists, spent the better part of the last forty-five years either playing on Emmylou Harris albums or roaming the land as one-half of the spousal bluegrass duo Barry & Holly Tashian—the band hunkered down in Boston’s most raucous club, the Rat. Melding a raw R&B sound with the frenzied side of the British Invasion, The Remains established themselves as a live act hailed by all witnesses as the greatest to ever do it, quickly drawing nightly sellout, and overflow, crowds to the rave-up haven.

Despite an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show (the illuminating evidence of which has been recently and inconspicuously removed from the Youtube annals) as well as opening for the Beatles on their final summer tour of the States, The Remains never gained a substantive following outside of New England and dissolved not long after the release of their eponymous debut record in 1966. As fate would have it, the group gained access to a broader audience just years later through the inclusion of their final single, “Don’t Look Back,” on Lenny Kaye’s 1972 trove of garage tracks, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968.

Though their unjustly sparse discography has no shortage of ace cuts, The Remains are best represented in all their frantic glory on the should-be rock ’n’ roll cornerstone, A Session with the Remains. Issued more than thirty years after the fact by Sundazed, this 1996 live-in-the-studio recording captures the group’s long-sought-after, scorching (and fruitless) audition for Capitol Records. With the exception of the band’s other masterful single “Why Do I Cry?,” the set consisted almost entirely of covers, a seemingly outlandish decision given the vigor of Tashian’s songwriting, but the live staples on display here, namely selections from Chuck Berry and the Kinks, emerge frighteningly close to definitive.

The opening track in particular, an absolutely manic rendition of “Hang On Sloopy,” offers the perfect summation of the Remains as an outfit of hard-driving, unadulterated vitality. Commencing with a cheeky holler of “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Tashian briefly states their intentions in one curiously splintered sentence before counting in the impending detonation. What follows is nothing short of a free-for-all to the nth degree. Between Tashian’s bark-like shouts and the group’s breakneck vocal back-and-forths, The Remains’ take doesn’t rework the version as made famous by the McCoys so much as blast it straight to hell, only halting for the rarest of moments in order to make the coming freakout all the more frantic.

Of course, this all prompts the question—what exactly constituted a satisfactory trial for the folks at Capitol?

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