Check out my website at BEAT BEHIND THE DYKES"I'm gonna tell you a story
I'm gonna tell you about my town
I'm gonna tell you a big bad story, baby
Aww, it's all about my town"
[Dirty Water, The Standells]
I grew up in the Achterhoek, the outermost eastern region of Holland, a Hinterland better known as the land of beer and bluntness ("bier en botterikken") Epicenter of this isolated spot is Winterswijk. That's where I was born. That's where I live. Famous local poet Gerrit Komrij rightly called it a drawbridge village without a drawbridge. I love Winterswijk as much as I hate it. The natural surroundings are beautiful. Life here is cosy and easy-going and without the fuss and rush of the Big City. It's rather boring too.
Music first came to me in the mid-70's through my older brother and through my comrades at school. Queen and Kiss were amongst the faves that I – for obvious reasons – nowadays confess reluctantly. Alice Cooper and Grand Funk Railroad can be admitted with less shame.
Punk oozed through to Winterswijk as late as 1979. I was 15 years old then. My favourite bands became The Buzzcocks (#1), The Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. Few punk records were available in my hometown. We frequently visited Amsterdam (RAF), Rotterdam (Backstreet) or Enschede (Plato/Elpee) for vinyl shopping. I lost interest in punk when it degenerated into a uniform and fermented into genres like Oi! and hardcore. I never liked bands such as The Exploited and G.B.H. The Dead Kennedys' "Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables" album was the last great in-your-face punk album by a band that most people considered hardcore.
Garage music sneeked in by chance in the early 80's. Some obscure albums with the word "PUNK!" on the cover found their way from the import boxes of RAF Records to my home. These albums turned out to be "Ear Piercing Punk" and "Boulders Vol. 1". My fascination with 60's garage really took off in 1984 after the 30-page "Mau Mau - Garage" special in Dutch pop magazine OOR. A true eye opener – and ear opener too! That's where I first heard about obscure U.S. 60's bands as The Drones, The Rovin' Flames or The Third Bardo. From that point collecting original 45's also became serious. Good Dutch Nederbeat 45's were quite easy to find these days. Spare copies were traded with likeminded record maniacs from around the globe. My first BEAT BEHIND THE DYKES record list was sent out in 1986. Greg Shaw (Bomp), Mark Crocker, Lenny Helsing (Thanes), Jürgen Richardt (Screaming Apple), Jean-Philippe Bidaine, Hugh Dellar (Beatpack), Mathias Buck, "Tim" Kobayashi (where are you?), Mark "The Wyldman" Prellberg and Lee Joseph (Dionysus) were among my first customers.
"Vegetable rights and peace, man!"
[Neil, The Young Ones]
In 1988 I was the singer in a short-time local band called The Vejtables. Initially called The Vegetables (named after the singing rotten vegetables in the fridge in the early 80's comedy series THE YOUNG ONES...or was it Neil's phrase "Hello Vegetables" ??) we adopted the name of the San Francisco "I still love you" 60's group (I don't think any of the other band members knew that). The idea was to dress up like vegetables on stage. The drummer had an orange carrot suit. I was supposed to dress up like a cucumber or so, but I never did. We were a very inconsistent band (to say the least!), but hey...we did cover versions of The Softs' "Paarse Broek", Outsiders "Touch" and C+B "Your Body Not Your Soul"....not that bad, huh?
In 1992 BEAT BEHIND THE DYKES turned into a professional ran mail order company and also started selling 45's by new garage bands. Lists were send out on a "4-times-a-year" schedule (how did I do that?). The 1990's were the high-days of the printed record list sent out - about 450 copies at it's peak! - by postal mail (the term 'smail mail' did not exist yet). I also started selling punkrock, mod and powerpop 45's from the 70's and 80's.
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