Outtasite surf & garage sounds from landlocked America! 

This compilation of unreleased & rare tracks from the Twin Cities’ Kay Bank Studios features 16 rip rollin’ cuts of some of the best surf and garage rock Kay Bank had to offer. Features The Trashmen, The Vaqueros, and more! Pressed on colored vinyl, with liner notes by John Blair!

By the time baby boomers graduated from high school in the 1960s, a handful of independent recording studios in the country had become as famous as some of the recordings that were created there. Sun Records in Memphis, Gold Star in Hollywood, the Norman Petty Studios in New Mexico, Muscle Shoals Sound in Alabama, Motown (Hitsville U.S.A.) in Michigan, and several others.

Kay Bank Recordings in Minneapolis was certainly one of these historic studios. It was named after the wife of owner Vernon Bank. Although he had been involved in the recording business since the late 1940s, Bank’s recording studio operation got underway in 1957 when he moved into a building that was large enough to also establish a pressing plant. The studio provided a 3-track Ampex recorder, a 12-input recording console, and a live echo chamber.

According to a 1958 article in the Minneapolis Star newspaper, Kay Bank was pressing 60,000 records each week, and Vernon Bank claimed that his studio provided the most complete facility of any other studio “between Pennsylvania and California.” The sign above the building’s entrance stated, “A Complete Recording Service From Master Tape to Pressed Record.”

Sundazed Music recently acquired a large archive of the existing Kay Bank master tapes. Some of the surf, and related, recordings in that archive are included in this compilation, all recorded between June 1964 and August 1966- at a time when the British Invasion was ravaging the sales charts.

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