Electric Eels

• Genre: Punk Pioneers
• Hometown: Cleveland
• Electric Eels Website

About

Arguably the first band to play shows and record music despite the fact that none of the members had any musical training or ability at all, Electric Eels were a proto punk band active in the earliest days of the seminal Cleveland scene of the early '70s. Together for three years (1972 to 1975), the band was banned from just about every venue they ever appeared at for doing things like running a lawnmower onstage, swinging sledgehammers around and picking fights with the audience members. The no-fi recordings they managed to make in between band breakups and a move to Columbus, Ohio, to avoid death threats were never officially released until 2001, when Scat released Eyeball of Hell, a compilation of all the material they were able to get on tape. The swinging, headache-inducing "Agitated" stands as probably their most well-known and, uh, "professional" song, but all 25 tracks on Eyeball of Hell are just as annoyingly, craptastically seminal for folks interested in music that is really, really bad.

- Mike McGuirk