The Swamp Rats were a short-lived band from Pennsylvania active between 1967 and 1968. They released just a handful of singles during their brief existence, but were influential as one of the first proto-punk bands. While the preponderance of the band’s recorded repertoire was cover versions, the Rats’ choice of material was rather special. Covering well known garage standards like “Louie Louie” and “Hey Joe”—along with more obscure cuts like The Sparkles’ “No Friend of Mine” and The Sonics’ “Psycho”—the Swamp Rats seem to have acknowledged the garage-rock genre while the phenomenon was still in vogue, fully five or six years before the music community at large recognized it via Lenny Kaye’s legendary Nuggets compilation. The Swamp Rats’ distillation of their fellow garage rockers centered on taking already potent material to powerful extremes, resulting in some of the ballsiest recordings of the genre. Some of the band’s 60s material was compiled on a slipshod 1979 album release, Disco Sucks, supplemented with later material recorded by band leader Bob Hocko and others. An improved version, Disco Still Sucks!, was released in 2003. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.