Hey kids, it's time to dust off the Wayback Machine again and go forward into the past! Let's set the controls for the New York of 1980 and, um, yeah, let's go ahead and bring that Glock, too. Can't be too careful.

In the ocean of pop, what's riding the cresting wave is Disco and, God help us all, Urban Cowboy. What we really want to focus on, though, is what was happening below the surface. Down among the kelp and the octopus lairs is what's really happening. Punk rock, according to which source you tend to credit, has either died on the vine or is just coming into its own. Attendant on Punk are the more commercially viable New Wave and the genre that will take twenty-some years to burst through into the consciousness of your average Jane or Joe, Post-Punk. Templates are still being codified, and the boundaries between genres are as porous as ever. In other words, Punk isn't yet synonymous with hardcore. You can get away with things now that will get you bottled off stage in about three or four years.

In the effort to strip Rock down to its bare essentials, some proponents of the new music have, somewhat ironically, rediscovered the joys of Garage Rock. It's ironic because Garage was closely tied to Psychedelia, the source of Prog and Pomp Rock and therefore the bane of every punk drawing breath at the time. Still, the primal howl of the stunted teenage degenerates bashing out countless hormonal odes to gettin' some echoed across that great generational gap between the early boomers and their later, spikier cohort. Fashions may change, but thwarted adolescent urges are eternal. The big difference this time out was the urban nature of the garagistas; in the sixties, the creation of garage rock had been primarily a suburban delight. Now it had come to the city, and teenagers in the suburbs (of whom I was one) knew garage rock only as an amusing footnote to rock & roll history. If we thought of it at all, we thought of it as trash rock.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, as they say.

And so it is that we find one Marty Thau, the man who sold bubblegum rock to a grateful America, erstwhile manager of the New York Dolls (if such a title may be bestowed upon the wrangler of the unmanageable) and discoverer of Blondie, sniffing the streets* for the latest in Rock and Roll fun. The first wave of NY punk bands being already signed and the No Wave scene being, generally, somewhat less than inspiring, he signs five up & comers to his Red Star label for a compilation survey of the garage end of "the scene", as it was referred to back in the day. Each band will record two cuts to appear together on one album. all produced by Jimmy Destri, the keyboard player for Blondie, and all ten tracks were recorded and mixed over the course of five nights at House of Music Studios in New Jersey. Pretty quick work, really. Five bands, each attempting, in their own way, to re-interpret the spirit of Garage Rock for the Nineteen Eighties. Thus was born 2 X 5.