THE LAST DINOSAUR


DRAGGING TAIL THROUGH THE DECADES WITH THE GET QUICK

by Nimue Marr, Shape & Sounds, Spring 2025

“There was a time when you couldn’t walk ten steps in Chelsea without hearing someone saying The Get Quick were either gods, ghosts, or government agents. Turns out, all three might’ve been right.”

There are bands that defined an era. Then there are bands that rewrote it. And then, far beyond that, there’s The Get Quick.

Solidified in the plush womb of early ’60s Soho, The Get Quick emerged like an hallucination in a mirrorball — equal parts art project, occult ritual, and pop juggernaut. They were the beautiful children of Fabian Kevorkian’s mad recording fancies, shaped by BBC studios, amphetamines, and strange experiments in “psychoacoustic entrainment.” By the time their third album dropped within the span of a year, they were already a bedrock of prophecy you could dance to.

To many they epitomized the spirit of the Swinging Sixties. But in reality they were the black light behind it...

Phase 1: Groovy Apocalypse


Their rise was fast and fiery. Their methods messy, their timing tighter than tight. They were chaotic and iconic — rock & roll incarnate.

Mitchell Joy — all sideburns in a crushed velvet suit with frilly blood spattered cuffs. Erik Evol — channeling sonic storms through his guitar and into audience’s dreams. Reed Russolo — broadcasting in mirror language by pirate signal off the coast of sanity. Coco LeBree — a perfume the very essence of revolution, dancing across form and gender through interviews and stage shows with shambolic grace... and blistering destruction.

First came Evol’s James Dean routine, checking himself out — of the party, the hospital, seemingly life itself... Then Russolo’s “shocking” (too soon?) onstage death — or discorporation, or immolation, or ritual rebirth, (depending on the zine). And then add LeBree’s well-documented instability to the many preternatural burdens solo stalwart Mitchel Joy had to shoulder.

Most bands would collapse inward and dissolve.

The Get Quick crystallized — and fractured into myth.

Phase II: Resurrection, in Stereo


Instead of staying dead, Evol (now reborn as Der Vanderwolf) returned from the aether, howling and radiant. The Commonplace Pleasure Cruise, now considered a classic, had basically tanked in ’68 but was mysteriously topping Australian charts in ’72. What followed was the 3rd leg of the Mammothgon Tour, an insane mouthful of a word and a world-spanning ritual of confusing costumes, collapsing dirigibles, class riots, and spiritual awakenings. A Japanese journalist embedded with the group later published Chashmal Sutra, a memoir that reads like a fever dream of missives between Mishima and Céline.

Their 1974 U.S. (4th and final) leg of the tour left the band physically ruptured, psychologically unseated and under 24 hour surveillance by multiple governments. Coco was arrested in Rio; Mitch was nearly assassinated in Detroit. But the tumult birthed the stunning double live album, Heavy Rollers, and the heavily bootlegged Legend Tripping, which closed the largest “larger than life” era of The Get Quick.

So far.

What followed were lawsuits, film loops, red tape, and a nuclear winter of quiet reclusions and seeded metamorphoses.

Phase 3: Fragmented Realities


By the time the ’80s rolled around, The Get Quick were seen as a cautionary tale — until the post-punk kids rediscovered them and the cult bloomed anew. Bootleg U-matics of The Amerikan Wranglers TV series aired at midnight screenings; Suddenly shadowy sideman Colonel Boran’s race car designs were the toast of Modena; Mitch was being hailed as a video media pioneer; and even Reed’s ghost got a fanzine.

Fabian Kevorkian, now a recluse in California, issued a baffling remix project of Sympathetic Nervous System on laserdisc in ’83. It was promptly deemed a “cultural destabilizer,” and banned in five countries. S True Smith sailed around the world brokering broadcasts of his outlaw TV station from various oil rigs. Coco LeBree reemerged in Paris as an ingénue playing virtuoso (and vice versa), while claiming to have “become music itself.”

And they even managed to fall into one another’s orbits long enough to create several runs of groundbreaking pop music — sonically rich and chock full of esoteric allusions. Giving the people what they didn’t even know they needed. And cementing their own mythology in the process.

Phase Four: Digital Possession


Since the dawn of the 2000s, The Get Quick have been both nowhere and everywhere. Their music — remastered, remixed, reimagined — haunts soundtracks, cologne commercials, virtual museums. The 2007 Amerikan Wranglers feature film campaign sparked lawsuits and bizarre conspiracy threads involving mind control, time jumps, and Vatican agents.

It has been teased that Joy will be appearing as a rogue archivist in an upcoming neo-noir streaming series. The consistently vanishing Vanderwolf is rumored to be running a secret label from a bullet train that circles the North Pole. Word across the web is Coco has been releasing encoded vocal meditations under the alias *K. The reclusive Christian Hait recently turned up at a Fertile Crescent oligarch’s lavish birthday party performing only classics from TGQ’s catalogue. S True Smith has been making clouded allusions to a new album via the vaunted Void Vault. And all the while unreleased TGQ tracks leak like holy relics through crypto back-channels.

The question is not if will they reunite, but when.

Only time will tell...

“Are we the last dinosaur—?”

—mused Mitchell Joy during a rare interview last year. “Maybe,” he nodded. “But some dinosaurs had feathers, yeah? And wings. Could be we’re the first phoenix.”

And so. The Get Quick are no longer just a rock band with a colorfully weird history. They’re a persistent anomaly. A sonic virus. A time-sliding faith. If they ever release another album, it won’t come on any known format. You’ll wake up humming it, like snatches of a dream. Then singing it, wondering how you know the words. Then hearing it unfold in your head, in its entirety, no clue how it materialized inside you. Maybe it’s happening right now...

Long live the last dinosaur.

The first phoenix.

The Get Quick.