'A hypnotic effect that fills you with joy': The incredible story of 96 Tears, the US's unlikeliest one-hit wonder

In 1966, a Mexican-American teen band made one of the great smash-hit singles and helped invent garage rock, a genre that has inspired artists for decades.

The strangest song to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966 wasn't 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. It was probably Staff Sergeant Barry Adler's pro-war dirge The Ballad of the Green Berets or perhaps the New Vaudeville Band's bassoon-driven music hall pastiche Winchester Cathedral.

But 96 Tears was certainly the unlikeliest number one: an ultra-lo-fi wig-out of a debut from a group of Tejano teens from small town mid-Michigan, recorded in a home studio for a tiny Tex Mex music label. "We were kids," guitarist Bobby Balderrama told the Two Guys Talking About Records podcast. "I'd be walking down the hall and people would say, 'There's that guy with the hit record,' and I kept thinking, 'Are they talking about somebody else?'" 

In contrast to Adler's and the New Vaudeville Band's efforts, 96 Tears wasn't a novelty song. It was a deadly serious two-minute tale of adolescent heartbreak and bitterness, delivered by a too-cool-for-school singer over a groovy haunted-house organ riff. There were no gimmicks or tie-ins that aided its ascent.

Instead, it was a steady-rising, radio-driven, honest-to-goodness pop smash. Released 60 years ago this summer, 96 Tears spent nine weeks in the US top 10 and one week at number one. It ended 1966 as Billboard's second best-charting single of the year, behind only the Mamas and the Papas' California Dreamin', and beating all-time classics from The Four Tops, The Supremes, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

It was also, by most people's definition, a total one-hit wonder: a follow-up single and debut album reached 22 and 66 respectively, but the band's second LP and subsequent singles went nowhere. By 1969, before its youngest members had finished school, ? and the Mysterians had split up.

Yet 96 Tears had a second life, as a founding text of garage rock and a set-list staple for countless other back-to-basics basement bands. Punk magazine founder Legs McNeil called it "a safe candidate for first punk rock song ever". In 2003, a panel assembled by Mojo magazine ranked 96 Tears eighth in its list of the greatest jukebox singles of all time.

The birth of garage rock

"Garage rock only came to be defined as a genre well after the original bands, like ? and the Mysterians, had mostly disappeared," ethnomusicologist José Vicente Neglia tells the BBC. In the early 70s, weary of rock's excesses, critics began retrospectively championing simpler sounds from forgotten regional guitar acts. Inspired by the British Invasion, hundreds of these bands had sprung up across the US in the mid-60s, playing rough-and-ready takes on contemporary pop and R&B. Some cut singles and achieved local renown via AM radio stations. And a few of these singles, like Louie Louie by the Kingsmen, crossed over and became national hits. 

The apex of this wave of garage one-hit wonders was 1966, with top 10s for the Count Five's Psychotic Reaction, Syndicate of Sound's Little Girl and the Shadows of Knight's take on Gloria, and a handful of garage-adjacent number ones. But even bare-bones chart-toppers like Tommy James and the Shondells' Hanky Panky sounded slickly professional compared to 96........

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