In the sleevenotes to Sundazed’s remastered reissue of the 1968 album Creation, Druids Of Stonehenge vocalist David Budge is at pains to distance the Manhattan-based group from the garage rock tag: “We took cabs, subways, buses or just plain hoofed it.” Short of wheels they may have been, but the garage was undeniably their spiritual home. For all the psych resonances of the band’s name, album title and bendy typeface, the Druids truly belonged among bald tyres, trays of stygian sump oil and dead batteries.
Their stock-in-trade was stark, thumpy, heavy-fringed, zit-encrusted and simian-jawed mid-tempo primitivism, like an American Troggs. Creation is chock-full of it, and is chiefly notable for Budge’s superbly bedraggled, punky, surly and hormonal moo-like-Jagger vocals. Earthless and Speed in particular are great, cumbersome, bell-bottom-dragging creations, brimming with Piltdown Man attitude.
The only thing that lets the album down is an overabundance of covers: great ones, admittedly (Signed DC, Bring It On Home, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue), but The Chocolate Watchband and Them had already snarled the Dylan song, while the world may not have required another version of I Put A Spell On You. Budge manfully jettisons his trachea on the latter regardless.
