The Mummies: the undead punks who pioneered budget rock
From the moment you lay eyes on them or read a descriptive footnote, bands like Roxy Music or The Residents grab you with such eye-popping visual front and deeply intriguing musical brews you know they’re immediately a band that must be experienced pronto. The Mummies are right up there with them. A surf punk fourpiece wrapped in horror embalmed bandaging taking garage rock to such depths of crude lo-fi they labelled themselves “budget rock”, matched with a feral onstage frenzy courtesy of front-mummy Trent Ruane—not unknown to quite literally wield his beat-up Doric organ above his head during their ephemeral underground shows.
Formed in California in 1988 by a cohort of like-minded high school friends and prior band outfits, The Mummies dropped their fuzzed-out B-movie attack amid a Bay Area scene saturated with mod and ska revivalists. Naturally, Ruane and co stood out, playing to a room of mods at San Francisco’s Chi Chi Club in their first official show, which left the crowd cold but won them support among the many local bands similarly wishing to tap into the garage rock two decades prior.
The Mummies also sought to unravel the psychedelic nostalgia that was swirling around the so-called Paisley Underground at the time, too, taking offence at the pristine recordings of a scene allegedly indebted to the original Nuggets generation’s primitive energy. “Those bands really irked me because listening to those original ’60s garage records was just such a shock, in a large part because of the way they were recorded,” Ruane told Vice in 2010. “I bought a few of those records, and they sounded like shit, really clean, like any other ’80s band. Russell and I thought it would be a lot more fun if we did a piss-take on that and said fuck the fashion and just do something really stupid.”
A disdain for modern recording innovations and digital mediums was a key feature of The Mummies’ modus operandi, their only time spent in a legitimate studio being BBC’s Maida Vale studios for their 1994 Peel Sessions. Following a string of singles recorded on a bedroom rack mount cassette 4-track, an album’s worth of material was later recorded for Crypt Records before being rejected by the band for its overly “professional” capture.
Released shortly after their first disbandment in 1992, their sole album, Never Been Caught, threw together their ugly concoction of 1950s and ’60s covers with their own grubby originals, only issued on vinyl and recorded in mono sound, sporting giant “fuck CDs” stickers slapped on the back cover.
Unbothered by legacy, the “about” section greets with the following statement: “The Mummies were a stupid band. This is their stupid website. You cared about them enough to get this far. Now you are stupid too. That’s the Mummies’ curse.”
On the contrary, The Mummies are a stupid band, Ruane and the gang still wrapping their bandages and playing live shows as recent as late last year. They even permitted the unthinkable—giving the OK for Telstar Records to issue Never Been Caught on the dreaded CD format in 2002 for its 10th anniversary.
So much of punk and garage is forever lauded, but The Mummies truly stand as a perennial inspiration for cash-strapped artists seeking to conjure an unholy rocket in the face of minimal equipment and economic precarity. Pick out Never Been Caught or any of their EPs and comps and let The Mummies’ curse work its deadly garage magic.
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