If Max Pain and the Groovies didn’t exist, someone would have to invent them.
Sometimes we daydream about forming our own personal cartoon cosmos of music, hand-drawn and unstoppable, filled with bands that are too cool to actually exist, with riffs so huge, so catchy, they can bridge the unimaginable, endless yawning void between galaxies. In space, no one can hear you get down and boogie.
But mostly, we just hang out and listen to Deep Purple records. With the billion-star-bright impression left in our mind after listening to “Electro Cosmic” by Max Pain and the Groovies, it’s like doing both of those things at the same time.
The fact is this: Max Pain and the Groovies really don’t sound like Deep Purple (nor should they). And we would likely like a band called Max Pain and the Groovies because we would like to like a band called Max Pain and the Groovies. And it’s only a bonus that Max Pain and the Groovies specialize in the type freedom-through-form rock and roll liberation that we find liberating. Songs about mud-tracks and moonshine, about moving faster than time can go, from a band called Max Pain and the Groovies? We’re into it.
C’mon – Max Pain and the Groovies have gone space truckin’. Or maybe space biking (“Swirvin’,” a psilocybin-Steppenwolf swirl of a song). They’ve almost certainly gone space fucking (“Spank Bank”). Then again, it’s hard to tell (“Hard to Tell”).
But we can tell you this: when we listen to “Murder,” and the odd, Jorma Kaukonan-esque guitar flourishes start to do their strange, beautiful, echoing insect calisthenics across the ridge-line of the great mountain of sound laid down by the fuzz-saw bass line, and the effortless, popping backbeat that puts us in the mind of Paul Revere and The Raiders, wearing face-bongs instead of tri-cornered hats … at that moment, there’s nothing better on earth than “Electro Cosmic” by Max Pain and The Groovies.
“Electro Cosmic” by Max Pain and the Groovies is available as a name-your-price download here. You’d be silly not to get it.
“The seed can be looked at in and of itself. Or it can be seen as a point in a process. Sitting quietly, breathing, inside and outside interpenetrating, we come up against similar wonderings. Where does one thing end and another begin? Contemplation involves slowing the mind down, taking it into the breath, until it manifests the natural rhythms of life itself, and no longer needs to grasp at the fruit of mental energy; you are down in the soil where thoughts grow, arise, die away. The foundation. The source. Giving rise to the ten thousand things, the whole manifest universe. I often contemplate the seed of our cosmos, which scientists tell us was very small and dense and hot: we were all packed in there together back in the day. Our minds and genitals and bank accounts and families were fused as one. Then there was an explosion, and we were torn apart. Our basic DNA is stardust, cosmologists tell us. We then grew arms and eardrums to connect once again; blood gurgled up to lubricate our movements; we grew feet to walk toward each other; retinas to take each other in; fingers to pick lice from each others’ coats of hair, and to slide rings onto one another.” – Shozan Jack Haubner
Revolt of the Apes 
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