The Backbone of the Backbeat

If The Get Quick is a haunted mansion, then Mitchell James Joy is the lunatic who built it — brick by brick, baseline by kick pattern, half in a vision quest, half in defiance of everything the world told him to be.

He’s The Thunder Conductor, the sneering architect, the last man standing when the ashtrays are full and the sound guy’s sweeping up in the back of the club. Founder, frontman, and perennial godfather of that snarling hydra of a band, Mitch Joy has been the only permanent member of The Get Quick through every break-up, blackmail plot, and black magick detour of the group’s 60+ year cosmic tantrum.

People say Mitch is a control freak. People say Mitch is a mastermind. People say Mitch once threw a vintage Mellotron into the Thames because it “sounded too smug.” The truth, as always with Mitch, is somewhere between kitchen sink stage drama and the padded walls of the psych ward — and more often than not, it’s plugged into a distorted tube amp and an Echoplex delay pedal.

He was there at the beginning: 1957 New York. Barely out of school and already wearing browline shades indoors, Mitch formed The Get Quick like a kid scrawling a manifesto in wet cement. He wanted a band that could bend minds, melt tape, and make you believe in God or the Devil — depending on the night and the key change.

Then in ’60, along with his new soulmates Erik and Coco, jumped ship for London, a scene crackling with cricket bats, pep pills, chukka boots, and guitar strings flecked with the blood of teenage brawls. It was the quintessential “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” moment. The boys hit Swinging Londinium like a match to a powder keg, and, to everyone’s surprise, became the toast of the town virtually overnight.

The Get Quick indeed.

Through the following years of walkouts, mutinies, lawsuits, disappearances, séances, and more than one bass player who swore the demonic underbelly of the songs were haunting their waking days, Mitch held the center. Even in the band’s darkest, most deranged hours — the Blackout Sessions, the Witch Trials Tour, the Cromicon Betrayal — it was Mitch who pulled the fusebox back together with chewing gum and pure spite.

Mitchell James Joy didn’t just keep The Get Quick alive. He embalmed it, burned it, buried it, exhumed it, shocked and resurrected it so many times the band stopped being a group and became a kind of possession — something that coursed through him like electricity through an old radio. Cracked, unpredictable, but still somehow, impossibly, playing all the hits.

— Mark Question, 2007