Sunday 3/17/24
When I was in college, I interviewed Question Mark of Question Mark and the Mysterians, having sought him out. His name came up as a question mark on the caller ID. How about that? Years later, I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about the best garage bands and included Question Mark and his group. I got this very angry, grammar-destroying, drunken-sounding letter about how awful I was for pointing out Question Mark's lasciviousness (in song--not in life), something that read like it was written by a female family member who thought Question Mark only composed motets.
This was a guy who had a lyric in 1967 that went, "Girl, you captivate me/Girl, you masturbate me," and who, on the 1984 Dallas reunion tapes with said band, offered up some of the most salacious stuff in all of garage or punk history. It was great. All of it. But this person wanted to string me up. Everything was all true. I didn't write the music or say the things. And "96 Tears" is about comeuppance via an inverted sixty-nine, if comeuppance that be. It's not a nice song, with the 96 being an adjective, as in the kind of tears one will cry in reference to the position from which they are generated. The dick-choking. We must not take this literally, though, but more as the imaginative result of teenage angst. The plotting when one is hurt in the fevered teenage brain.
Question Mark kept calling back, by the way, that time I was in college, to pass on more information about himself, much of it regarding how he was born on another planet. My roommate got annoyed, and after the third or fourth time when he checked the ID said, "It's Question Mark again," in an exasperated tone of voice. I think he was miffed at both of us, this roommate being the one mentioned in the acknowledgements to the Sam Cooke book.
I love both Question Mark and the Mysterians albums and that Dallas date, which is one of my favorite live albums. Totally wild. The band's second LP, Action, is rather heavy for 1967. It's still garage music, but garage music nudging up to--or towards--heavy metal. I downloaded digital copies of those first two discs this morning. The page for that digital download featured some liner notes from 2005, which were written by an editor of mine, so after I read them at like three in the morning the other day I wrote him about that. I've actually a lot to spread the good word--that's not a Bible reference--about Question Mark. Hell, I've been a committed Mysterians enthusiast since the middle of high school.
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