The 3B Tavern, Bellingham, Washington, 1995. The bar is packed well past capacity with a sea of sweat-drenched bodies. 1950s monster-movie posters decorate the walls around them. CJ Stritzel, just over six feet tall with large shoulders, a narrow figure, and thick, black-framed glasses, stands on stage. He’s wearing a dark, short-sleeve button-down shirt, which, like everyone else’s in the bar, is soaked in sweat. He’s banging away at his guitar with a fluidity that makes it look like a fifth limb. There’s a lot of noise coming out of the amplifier behind him. It sounds like barks, or explosions, nuggets of an emotional hailstorm. Red-painted flames light up the wall behind him, as though they’re coming directly from the amplifier. His face is a snapshot of concentration. It’s hard work to get those sounds.

On the other side of the stage, Lorca Wood looks down over her bass guitar. She’s wearing a black t-shirt with the sleeves torn off. Blonde streaks mix in with the black hair matted down wet against her forehead. She, too, is locked in concentration on the riff she plays, one every rock ‘n’ roll fan recognizes but can’t name; in her hands, it sounds like a rolling thunder. Keith Herrera sits at the drum kit behind both of them. His kit is small, just a snare drum, bass drum, floor tom, and cymbal—and he probably can hardly see it behind the sunglasses he wears—but he’s getting the most out of each of them, his hands a blur. He, too, is drenched in sweat.

Some 300 people are on the floor of the club in front of them. A few are slam-dancing into each other—after all, some of them use the term “punk rock” to describe the music the band is playing. The rest are dancing in place or standing transfixed, heads bobbing, feet tapping, and sweating. From the back of the room, they make a unified mass, like a hyper-ventilating body moving together in time to the song.

Stritzel hits a chord and lets it ring out and feed back. He grabs the microphone and falls to his knees, torso bent over his guitar, which rests in his lap. He sings, “There’s lots of ways to go / What’s the most appealing? / I could tie a rope around my neck / Swing from the ceiling / I could take a bunch of pills / Get real gone / I could take a bath with the radio on.” Then he hits his guitar again as Wood and Herrera transition with him, and the song explodes into its chorus. “I like to die,” he sings, and repeats until it appears he can’t go on any longer.

The band is called the Drags, and they leave the stage to a storm of clapping, whistling, and shouting. If they had 30 diehard fans before the show began, they’ve just multiplied it by 10. The event is Garage Shock, an annual, four-night festival put together by Estrus Records that brings together the best garage-rock bands the world over—from France, from Brazil, from Tokyo, from Opelika, Alabama. The Drags are smack dab in the middle of the bill, the third of five bands on Saturday night. They have just staked out their own piece of garage turf, establishing themselves as one of the premier bands the genre has to offer. In two years, they’ll headline opening night of the same event, having just released their second record; in four years, they’ll release their third record, filled with sounds and instruments never before heard in the garage-rock genre. In five, they’ll be playing in a bedroom filled with a sampler, three cellos, and an oboe, among other instruments, in a ramshackle Victorian 30 miles outside of Nowhere, California. And in six, they will have taken their music, packed it in a closet, and closed up shop for good.

The story of their rise and fall runs in tandem with the rise and fall of that era’s garage scene altogether. It explodes with flair and passion, and then it crashes and burns, and dies away, hardly to be heard from ever again.

CJ Stritzel grew up in Tucson, Arizona, a city one local calls “a retirement community with a university, no money, and no jobs.” In the early ’90s, he left his hometown for the next city east. In the endless empty stretch of land that is America’s Southwest, he drove from one desert outpost to another and landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a town often referred to as “dead,” or, more poetically, by a former resident as “everything you’d imagine and less.” Stritzel came to go to the university there, but he really came to form a band, and when that happened, he quit school altogether, 173 school credits, or about two years’ worth of classes, later.

Lorca Wood grew up in Oklahoma City. She, too, came to Albuquerque for school—in her case, to study art. On her first day in town, she says, “I pulled into Walgreen’s and there was a fight. One guy had a pick axe and the other guy had a baseball bat. That’s Albuquerque.” It’s a town where people will kill your dog to keep him quiet after they’ve broken into your house to steal money to feed their heroin habit, where visiting bands get their gear stolen or get jumped if they walk down the wrong alley at the wrong hour. In the film No Country for Old Men, the shootout scene between the heartless killer played by Javier Bardem and the common man-turned-renegade played by Josh Brolin was shot on Albuquerque’s main drag. In the early morning darkness, the street is dark and desolate, and both of their lives are one wrong move from death. As one future band member tells me, “Every person you run into is talking about how they’re trying to get out of there.” New Mexico’s state slogan is the Land of Enchantment. Albuquerque was known as the Land of Entrapment.

Wood first met Stritzel in 1992, when he and a mutual friend, a drummer, told her they were forming a band. On a lark, she told them she was a bass player, even though she wasn’t. “I played the cello,” she says. “I didn’t own a bass. Had never picked one up in fact.”

“The first time she played it was kind of weird,” Stritzel says. When she picked up the bass, she said, “You hold it this way then, I guess.” “I thought that was really cool,” he says. It makes sense. At that time, he was trying to unlearn how to play the guitar. “He’d say he was so envious of how I played,” Wood says. “He’d been playing guitar for a long time, and he felt he was too good. He longed to go back to this place where it wasn’t how technically good you were, but that you had this spirit, this rawness. He made a concerted effort to recreate that.”

They called the band the Swizzle Sticks. Stritzel describes their initial effort as “a cut-rate Sonic Youth.” But the more they practiced, the more their tastes were refined. “As we started doing it, the thing that turned us on was playing more repetitive and for not that long a time,” he says. What began to emerge was their lo-fi interpretation of ’60s garage rock. This change didn’t please their mutual friend much, and the two of them soon found themselves without a drummer. It wouldn’t be the last time. But in a college town, no band need be without one for long, and soon Keith Herrera, who’d just left the band Big Damn Crazy Weight, joined up.

Herrera was Albuquerque’s man about town. At the time, Big Damn Crazy Weight was the city’s musical success story. They’d released a single on Sub Pop Records, the birthplace of grunge and the biggest independent record label in the country. The band was more metal than the Seattle sound the label would become famous for, mixing into their music Albuquerque’s dark interior. Herrera owned the record label Resin Records. He booked bands. He knew everybody in town and everybody in town knew him. When the Swizzle Sticks decided to take their act public, all the locals knew about it.

The band’s first show was on election night of 1992, the year grunge entered the mainstream as one of its purveyors, Mudhoney, left Sub Pop and released their first record on a major label; the year Nirvana’s Nevermind hit #1 on the Billboard charts; the year the little world of independent music became big business. The show was at the Golden West Saloon, one of Albuquerque’s two main music venues. Not much remains from that show. Not the band name—they soon became known as the Drags, after another band informed them that the name the Swizzle Sticks was already taken; not the memories of it for any of them, save for the nerves beforehand; and not even the club, which burned down last year due to the spontaneous combustion of rags bathed in linseed oil. Fires, it would appear later, seemed to follow the garage scene wherever it went.

The Drags began to play out regularly, and this helped refine Stritzel’s songwriting. “I saw that other stuff didn’t get to the back row in the same way that something really simple did.” They decided they were ready to release a single. When Albuquerque bands needed to record, they went to Gary Hansen’s house in the South Valley. Hansen was the soundman for the Golden West Saloon, and he recorded everyone, from the Drags to the Sammy Hagar cover band. He was in a heavy metal band called Scary Hansen and all the equipment in his house had “Scary Hansen” stenciled on it. His was a home only a musician could love. The mixing board was in the kitchen, the PA stacks were in the living room, and the microphones were in the bathtub. “To this day,” Herrera says, “I have no idea where that guy showered, or if he even showered.”

“I Like to Die” came out on Herrera’s record label. It begins with a primitively plucky Cramps-sounding guitar, and, as Tim Kerr—the leader of the garage bands Jack O’Fire and the Lord High Fixers—later would tell Stritzel when describing his own songs, it was about “cool shit, like death.” It would become the Drags’ show-stopper for the next few years. “We were really fascinated with the line between fun and funny,” Stritzel says. “I wanted to be—it’s not a fuckin’ joke, but at the same time it should be humorous. ‘I Like to Die’ is a good example of that lyrically. It’s funny, but it’s not.”

The band’s shows were the same way. They were full of wild, manic energy. Stritzel would run around the stage like a patient who’d just escaped from the psych ward. He’d spit into the air and catch it. He’d alternately entertain and berate the audience with a barely controlled rap. He’d attack his guitar with a fury that came out of the amplifier sounding primitive and impassioned. One night, the band might show up as dead people, drenched in blood and with faces painted a ghostly white. The next night, they might be in country and western garb. They’d learn new covers for every set—the Pretty Things’ “Rosalyn”, early Fleetwood Mac’s “Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight.” No two shows were ever the same. “We tried to do as much as we could every night,” Stritzel says. “There are some bands you see and you know they’re never going to be bad. They’re going to sound pretty much like this every night. That really scared me. I knew that if you were never willing to risk being totally shitty and totally suck, you were never going to be really great either. That always struck me. You have to be able to risk being awful.”