What do you get when you take five ex-Army servicemen living in Germany and you form a band in which all the members wear black monastic robes and tonsured hair and every instrument focuses only on the rhythm and every song ignores traditional verse/chorus structure?

Well, you don’t get hit records.

Welcome to The Monks!

In 1963, a few GIs stationed in Gelnhausen formed a band called The Torquays to play rock & roll covers at any venue where they could find military personnel to entertain. A couple of members came and went as they were discharged or stationed elsewhere, but after establishing a stable five-piece lineup with everyone now out of the service, the band signed with a German manager who promised plenty of live gigs if they would stay in the country. He kept his word and the band played every night.

Eventually growing tired of their bar band image and derivative sound, The Torquays began penning their own material — demented, cacophonous rock & roll devoid of choruses and normal song structures. In 1965, they changed their name to The Monks, adopting a surprisingly menacing look for the time with their all-black habits and tonsured hair. Combined with their loud and aggressive sound, The Monks stood in sharp contrast to the popular long hair and folk rock everywhere else.

Signed to Polydor Records, the band finally recorded their debut album in 1966, playing every night for hours at a club and then spending the next morning in the studio (they were so loud and distorted in the studio that the engineers had trouble capturing the sound). Exhaustion set in as the band toured relentlessly in Germany to promote the album, but hostile audiences and low sales began to take their toll.

Polydor pushed The Monks to compromise their sound, making it more mainstream, and band members were divided about their direction. Some wanted to add the cover songs back into the repertoire, while others wanted to abandon the all-black look for the more colorful sartorial stylings of the day, and one quit because he thought they were all going to die if they played a scheduled concert in Vietnam. The chaos was too much, and by the fall of 1967, The Monks were no more.

But they left behind a small collection of some of the most unique songs in rock & roll history. And they did it like true rock & roll rebels.

Pax vobiscum.

Amazingly, Apple used “Boys Are Boys” in an iPhone commercial back in 2017 (which was quite surprising at the time for those of us already familiar with the band). The band’s songs are short, so let’s throw a couple more on the barbie so you get a bit more of the flavor: