Q 65

Based on sheer musical ability, the Q 65 deserved to be at least as well known as the Pretty Things or the Yardbirds. Indeed, the Dutch quintet could have held their own with either of those groups or the Animals without breaking a sweat, based on the recorded evidence, and they also had room for some of the more countrified blues evident in the work of the Downliners Sect. Yet the Q 65 have remained one of Europe's best-kept star caliber musical secrets for more than 30 years. The Q 65 were Frank Nuyens (guitar, vocals, sax, flute, harmonica), Wim Bieler (vocals, harmonica), Peter Vink (bass), Joop Roelofs (guitar), and Jay Baar drums, who first got together in 1965, in the Hague. The city was known as "the Liverpool of the Netherlands," with a music scene that had been thriving since the end of the 1950s. Instrumental groups, patterned after the sound of the Shadows had been very big at that time. Peter Vink and Jay Baar had been playing in a blues-based band called Leadbelly's Limited before they hooked up with Wim Bieler, Frank Nuyens, and Joop Roelofs to form the Q 65 in February of 1965. The group's professed influences were American soul acts like Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding, yet somehow, when they performed, what they played came out closer in form and spirit to the likes of the Pretty Things, the Downliners Sect, and the Yardbirds than it did to any of those soul acts, at least at first. They landed a recording contract with Phonogram, a unit of Philips Records, late that year, and put on the Decca label. Their first single, "You 're the Victor," was released in February of 1966. This was a strange record for a band professing an admiration of Sam & Dave or Wilson Pickett, a frantically paced piece of punk-style blues-rock with an infectious Bo...