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Preceding to 1994, if you mentioned the name Destroy All Monsters to punk aficionados, it conjured only a adolescent footnote: a band in Michigan rock music history known for the participation of the former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and the MC5 bassist Michael Davis. But by the period its first single, “Bored,” was released in 1978, three of the bunch’s four original members had left; two of them, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, had headed west to be associated with graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.
During the orbit of the next two decades, Kelley — who died on February 1 — and Shaw rose to the uppermost echelons of the international art world. Their work prompted considerable interest in the bantam-heard earlier incarnation of DAM, which also included the filmmaker Cary Loren and the chanteuse Niagara. In 1994, Sonic Man’s Thurston Moore and the music critic Byron Coley issued a wasteful three-CD set of archival DAM recordings, which was a revelation to many. It garnered unexpected critical accolades and prompted a series of reunion projects, including performances, recordings, art exhibitions, and publications that brought together a number of ephemera, such as the collective’s eponymous post-psychedelic, pre-punk zine.
Source: ARTINFO