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DVD EXTRAS
- Biographies: Dave, Eddie, Gary, Larry and Roger talk about their origins and musical backgrounds
- A date with Dave Day these field recordings with Elvis fan Dave Day introduce us to the concept of monks banjo playing. Enjoy this master class by the first rock´n´roll banjo player in music history!
- Monks 60s live appearances on german tv: the only 60s performances preserved on film are made available for the first time in their entirety.
- Reunion New York 1999: the 6th monk or how Gary Burger lost his voice and Mike Fornatale rescued the monks.
- Movie trailer
- Liner notes by Allison Anders and filmmakers.
Featuring: The five original monks, Charles Wilp (fashion photographer, composer, Afri-Cola guru, ARTronaut), Jimmy Bowien (Polydor producer of the monks), Gerd Henjes (Polydor sound engineer of the monks), Wolfgang Gluszczewski (tour manager of the monks), Joachim Irmler (Faust, 60’s eyewitness and fan), Jon Spencer (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 90’s fan) , Genesis P-Orridge (Psychic TV & Throbbing Gristle, 60’s fan) and Peter Zaremba (Fleshtones, 90’s fan)
SYNOPSIS
The monks were 5 American GI’s in cold war Germany who billed themselves as the anti-Beatles; they were heavy on feedback, nihilism and electrical banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, punk and techno music.
The genre-overlapping documentary film not only illustrates the pop music phenomenon in its political, social and cultural historic contexts, but also reveals the monks project as the first marriage between art and popular music and this months before Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.
The five protagonists of the film came to cold war Germany in 1961 as soldiers and left the country in 1967 as avant-garde monks.
For more than thirty years they were not able to talk about their strange experience. In the film they recount for the first time their adventure.
