In November 1965, the doors had just opened for business, James Osterberg was not yet Iggy Pop, and the Velvet Underground were four months away from recording their debut album. Meanwhile, the Monks – five ex-GIs living in what was then West Germany – were in a studio in Cologne cutting the most precociously extreme, exuberantly screwy platter in rock history.

To this day, there is nothing in art rock, punk rock or nut rock that comes close to the goony conceptual rigor of the Monks' image (monastic threads, partially shaved domes) and the crude, avant-biergarten sound of the group's sole LP, Black Monk Time. Imagine the stark, raving dada of the Fugs bumrushing the crisp la-di-da of '60s Brit pop – pogo-action rhythms, the taut-rubber-band twang of an electric banjo, big-fuzz guitar, pidgin-beatnik verse ("Oh How to Do Now," "Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice") delivered in wigged-out chants and yodels. Long before disgruntled draftees in Vietnam were getting baked on hard drugs and Jimi Hendrix records, the Monks brought the neuroses of Cold War-era front-line service to bear on rock & roll.

The 19 tracks on this first-ever U.S. issue of Black Monk Time (the original 12-song German-label release, plus rare 45s, demos and a '66 live number) are warped-riff stomps performed with a shredded-nerve intensity just this side of total emotional meltdown. In "Monk Time," singer and guitarist Gary Burger brays like a scalded mule – "It's beat time! It's hop time! It's Monk time!" – over pneumatic drumming, the brittle clank of Dave Day's banjo and a numbing one-note organ riff. "I Hate You" is "96 Tears" soaked in battery acid – two chords, a forced-march beat, impressively ugly guitar distortion – and charged with a violent sexual tension ("I hate you with a passion, baby!/But call me!") that suggests "I Want to Hold Your Hand" – at gunpoint.

The amazing thing about the Monks is that they didn't play this stuff as high-attitude corn; Burger, Day, bassist Eddie Shaw, drummer Roger Johnston and organist Larry Clarke actually believed they were making pop music. And they were right. In the tense rhythmic frenzy and absurdist chorales of "Complication" ("Complication! Constipation!") and "Higgle-dy Piggledy," the Monks set the standard for the contagious, anything-goes lunacy of '60s garage rock, '70s punk and '90s grunge – way ahead of schedule.

The Monks paid heavily for their audacity, breaking up in 1967 after tasting only minor German success. But with this reissue, they're back just in time to kick rock & roll out of its post-Nirvana, premillennial blues. Now, more than ever, it's Monk time. (RS 758)

DAVID FRICKE