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***In 1975 five Bostonians with a shared obsession for '60s rock'n'roll and the Detroit sounds of The Stooges and the MC5 deemed the current musical landscape so bleak that they had to form their own band, with the sole objective of "fusing the sound of the Chocolate Watchband and The Stooges," according to their outspoken frontman, and notoriously obsessive record collector Jeff "Mono Man" Conolly. DMZ developed a strong local following in Boston and, in New York, became fast friends with The Ramones (with whom they would eventually share many bills). The band released an EP on Bomp! in early '77 and soon caught the eye of Sire Records, who snapped them up for the label's growing roster of "new wave" bands (which included the Ramones, Dead Boys, Richard Hell, The Saints, and Radio Birdman, to name a few). Flo & Eddie were chosen to produce the group's debut full length; the two former members of The Turtles turned out to be an appropriate production team for DMZ's smoldering batch of originals along side very well chosen covers by The Sonics, The Wailers and The Troggs. The album's release was greeted with a deafening silence when it came out in 1978. Their long-haired appearance in the current "new wave" climate and the lack of a single live show outside of the East Coast did not help. They split up shortly thereafter, and Mono Man started The Lyres, who relied even more heavily on a retro '60s sound than DMZ. By the late 1980s a strong underground garage rock movement had developed in the US and Europe, and DMZ were finally cited as an influence by a great number of young bands (Pussy Galore named a song "Mono Man" and covered DMZ's "When I Get Off"; the Mono Men formed in Washington; and in the midwest, the Boys From Nowhere did likewise). Though a tribute album was released, DMZ's debut album has remained out of print all this time. |
