Black Monk Time

Starting out as just another pick-up rock 'n' roll band to follow the Beatles' lead, the Monks would eventually become one of the '60s' most interesting musical footnotes. The Monks' story--told here by former Monk Shaw and his wife--proves that Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground and the American garage psychedelia of such bands as the Count Five and the Seeds were hardly the isolated fads they may have seemed. American GIs stationed in Germany at the height of the Vietnam War, the Monks unleashed a brooding combination of guitar feedback and existential rants; such songs as ``Complication,'' ``Shut Up'' and ``I Hate You'' captured the darker tensions of their era. In the background of the Monks' staged chaos, a love story also unfolded, but unfortunately neither Klemke nor Shaw evokes any real emotion in their writing. The band's brief glory days are blurred by the book's arrangement, which alternates between Shaw's first-person and Klemke's third-person accounts and descriptions are too slight throughout to read as anything more than pale '60s nostalgia. Ultimately, Black Monk Time is unlikely to secure the Monks the wider recognition they do in fact deserve. (Feb.)