Battle of the Garage Bands: The Litter v The Misunderstood

Well, well, well. We have the first showdown in the books and it surprised me. Big time. This is why we have all these celebrity judges helping out. I flat out expected The Squires to make it deep into the brackets. Not even close. The Blues Magoos took their New York power and ran rough-shod over their New England Brethren.

So now we spin the winner of the Midwest region, Minnsesota's The Litter, against Southern California's hotly contested winner, The Misunderstood. The seven judges, who Donald Trump has described "as the most classy, opulent judges in the world", will now settle the score with these two bands and their powerful releases from 1967. Don't forget, both sides count in the consideration of the greatness of the record.

Original post on The Litter can be found here.

Original post on The Misunderstood can be found here

To put this into better context, here is a look at some of the competition that these cats bested as they claimed their regional victory.

Until next time, we'll see you On The Flip-Side!

And the winner of the Mid-West Region is...

The unanimous winner of the Mid-West Battle of the Garage Bands competition is none other than The Litter with their January, 1967 release of Action Woman/Legal Matter. The Minnesota combo will now join the other regional winners in the waiting room as we move on to our next region, The Rocky Mountains.

As soon as we complete each region (we have 4 more to do), the 11 regional winners will then square off in a head to head battle in an effort to definitively set in stone the ultimate Mount Garagemore record ever released. Here are the winners for each region thus far.

Mid-West: The Litter with Action Woman/Legal Matter

Texas: The 13th Floor Elevators with You're Gonna Miss Me/Tried To Hide

New England: The Squires with Going All The Way and Go Ahead

The South: The Bad Roads with Too Bad/Blue Girl

Great Lakes: The Shadows of Knight with Bad Little Woman/Gospel Zone

The Mid-Atlantic: The Enfields with She Already Has Somebody/I'm For Things You Do

New York: The Blues Magoos with We Ain't Got Nothing Yet/Gotta Get Away

Until next time, we'll see you On The Flip-Side!

Mid-West Spotlight: The Litter - Action Woman/Legal Matter

More Midwest mayhem today with our 2nd entry for the region's Battle of The Garage Bands competition. It's The Litter performing the garage classic, Action Woman.

Action Woman was released on Scotty Records in January 1967 (with a Flip-Side of The Who's Legal Matter) and after all these years, feels just as fresh today as it did the day it was released. The song is so epic that it led off the first Pebbles record even though their copy of Action Woman skipped!

The Minneapolis hipsters who comprised The Litter were Jim Kane on bass, Tom Murray on drums, Dan Rinaldi on guitar, Denny Waite on vocals and the very talented Bill Strandlof on lead guitar. That said, we need to talk a little about Warren Kendrick here. Kendrick was a local math teacher who formed his own label (Scotty) in 1965 in attempt to get on the rock-n-roll bandwagon after watching The Beatles light the world on fire on the Ed Sullivan Show. The math teacher began writing and producing and releasing numbers for the local Minneapolis kids to perform. Action Woman has Kendrick's signature all over the number. He wrote it, produced it and distributed it himself. Another of his band's, The Electras, released this number on the same label, just a month after The Litter. It's pretty damn awesome, but we'll go with The Litter's version as the definitive take on the song.

The fine, fine flip-side is Pete Townshend's Legal Matter. This is certainly one of the better covers of a song from the hard to cover The Who. Incidentally, Action Woman got re-released 8 months later on a different label, this time paired with The Small Faces' Whatcha Gonna Do About It. These guys knew their UK mod bands!

Until next time, we'll see you On The Flip-Side!