In an era when rosy-cheeked rock 'n' rollers were singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and 'I'm a Believer,' only one band had the audacity to write a song called 'I Hate You.' That group, which recorded its only album two years before the Summer of Love and a full decade before the first inkling of punk, was the Monks.

Five former U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Germany, the Monks started out as a garden-variety bar band called the Torquays. They changed their name, look and music after befriending a couple of German art students who vowed to make them the "hardest band in the world."

Though they'd developed a jittery garage-band sound inspired by the British beat groups that sprung up in the wake of the Beatles, the Monks positioned themselves as the anti-Beatles -- not mop-topped boys-next-door but psychotic-leaning weirdos dressed as medieval friars. The Fab Four's "pretty harmonies and sphincter-tight band arrangements," as frontman Gary Burger recalled years later, were exciting but not realistic: "The world wasn't a sweet place. Germany itself was a troubled country." So the Monks set out to make ugly music for an ugly world.

Their unique sound featured Larry Clark's funereal organ chords, Dave Day's amplified six-sting banjo scratchings and the unhinged ranting of Burger, who could sound like an oldies version of Sam Kinison. Their inadvertent introduction to guitar feedback, wrote bassist Eddie Shaw in his book about the band, was "like discovering fire."

Yet the Monks' strange legacy was as much about their appearance as their sound. On the urging of their German cohorts, they shaved tonsures into their hair and began performing in black robes and wearing nooses as neckwear. Their new motto, recalled Burger, was "Come to us if you love abuse." One guy jumped onstage and grabbed the singer by the throat: A guitar neck planted "in the side of his face calmed him down."

Despite the animosity, the A&R team at the Monks' German-based label, Polydor, was perversely drawn to the band's demo tape. "We don't like the Army!" Burger squawked on 'Monk Time,' the lead track on the band's lone album, 'Black Monk Time.' With a bird's-eye view courtesy of their stint in the military, the Monks were one of the first rock groups to protest the Vietnam War.

Like the pre-stardom Beatles in Hamburg, the band played absurdly long nightclub gigs, sometimes up to eight hours. "It was like we were slaves," Shaw recalled. The experience contributed to the avant-garde concept for a never-realized second album, 'Silver Monk Time,' which was envisioned as a repetitive tom-tom beat saturated with feedback. Sent on the road to promote the debut album, the band endured more than a year of grueling one-nighters in beer halls around Germany. Drinking, pill-popping and the inevitable struggle to adopt a more commercial sound eventually drove the group into the ground.

A 1990s reissue of 'Black Monk Time' brought Monks admirers out of the woodwork, including Julian Cope, Jello Biafra, the Gossip and the Fall. In 2008, a German documentary on the group (now on DVD) earned the country's equivalent of an Emmy Award. To Shaw, one of three surviving members, the short-lived group couldn't help but leave an undeniable effect on its listeners. "If we created some primeval urge to break laws or to defy morality," he said, "then that happened to be that person's problem."