The Litter

The Litter ranked among Minneapolis's leading bands throughout the 1960s and earned their widest renown via the 1967 garage-rock single "Action Woman." Its ferocious fuzz-and-feedback guitar lines and brash, sneering vocal made the track a defining specimen of the hard-edged style later championed by devotees of the Pebbles reissue series. Although the record aired on Minnesota stations in the first months of 1967 and then slipped from notice, it reached listeners worldwide only after opening side one of Pebbles Volume One in the late 1970s. The song now occupies a prominent spot in the Nuggets box set. More durable and prolific than most regional garage acts, the Litter issued several albums—the last on a major label—shifted toward progressive hard rock, and continued until roughly the close of the decade.

The group coalesced from personnel of two earlier mid-1960s Minneapolis outfits, the Victors and the Tabs; a handful of Victors recordings from late 1965 later surfaced on the anthology The Scotty Story. Strongly shaped by the most aggressive British Invasion outfits, notably the Yardbirds and the Who, the Litter cut their debut single, "Action Woman"/"A Legal Matter," with local producer Warren Kendrick in late 1966. The A-side was in fact a Kendrick composition rather than an original. Bill Strandlof, whose searing lead guitar defined "Action Woman," gave way to Tom "Zippy" Caplan in spring 1967, just before the band tracked most of the material for its first album. Although Distortions leaned on covers of songs by the Yardbirds, the Who, and Small Faces, the LP stood as a powerful exemplar of 1960s garage rock. During the subsequent revival, the original pressing became a prized collector's item and has been reissued repeatedly.

Following the pattern of many late-1960s bands, the Litter moved into psychedelic and hard-rock territory. Their second album, $100 Fine, stressed original songs yet revealed a more conventional sound. At the same time the group declined offers from Elektra and Columbia. They appear briefly in a 1968 Chicago psychedelic-club sequence in Haskell Wexler's film Medium Cool, though their performance is silent; the Mothers of Invention's "Flower Punk" was dubbed over the footage. When the band finally reached a major label with 1969's Emerge on ABC, both Caplan and founding singer Denny Waite had departed, and the hard-rock style had lost much of its earlier character. Different lineups of the Litter have reconvened for performances and recordings that extended into the 1990s.