Huh? And The Mysterions

Previously: 100,000 Candy Bars You Never Got A Chance To Taste

I was about 15 years old before I started taking an interest in songs on the radio.  I found I really liked this song I was hearing that had just hit number one on KHJ radio's top forty, "96 Tears."  I recall the disc jockey saying the name of the group was unpronounceable and that made me all the more curious, so I went down to the Anaheim mall and bought the 45.  But the record label just listed the artists as  "? and the Mysterions." 

I didn't know how I was supposed to pronounce that question mark part so in my head I silently pronounced the band's name to myself as  "huh?" and the Mysterions. This was the sixties, and that pronunciation made as much sense to me as anything else those days.

It was many years later -decades, actually- when I finally learned the group's name was pronounced "Question Mark and the Mysterions."

Duh. 

Glad I never pronounced my version of the name out loud among my peers. I was in 9th grade and wouldn't have been able to bear the shame. 

Anyway, by listening to the record over and over I found I could learn to play that riff by ear on my little sister's toy organ, as the song simply slipped from a C chord to a C minor and back again repeatedly.  The church janitor happened to be my neighbor, and one weekday I went to work with him so  I could sneak into the chapel and practice that song on the massive church organ while no one else was in the building.  Teenage heaven, my friend. Teenage heaven.

Here's that record, which I probably shouldn't have been playing in church, as rock historians have since dubbed it one of the early precursors to the Punk Rock movement:

By the way, you may have guessed that the lead singer's name wasn't really Question Mark. It was Rudy Martinez.  And Rudy wants people to know they are a Mexican band. “We lose our national identity when we say Hispanic,” he said. “People don’t connect the good things we do with being Mexican, and that hurts our image as a people.” -Fifty Years Later Question Mark and the Mysterions are as Mysterious as Ever.

Next Up: The Very First Rock & Roll Record: 1934