96 Tears by ? & The Mysterians

96 Tears, the 1966 debut by ? and the Mysterians, came out on Cameo-Parkway after the title single had already done the impossible: a garage band from Bay City and Saginaw, Michigan, went all the way to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 29. The single had started life on the Pa-Go-Go label earlier that year. The album itself got to 66 on the pop albums chart and stayed on it for fifteen weeks, the same run as the single, while "I Need Somebody" hung on for ten.

The sound is cheap organ drone and a snarl up front, the raw, ringing voice of the man who called himself ? (Rudy Martinez off stage), and their enigmatic image came from a 1957 Japanese science fiction film. Critics have since counted them among the earliest bands anyone called punk. First pressings even botched the label, listing the closer as plain "Tears".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.