It’s the perfect setting for a ’60s garage band to be rehearsing in: a quiet residential street in western Peabody, with freshly cut grass and a few suburbanites walking their dogs — heck, it’s just like the Monkees’ " Pleasant Valley Sunday. " And sure enough, the local rock band down the street are trying hard to learn their song. In this case they’re huddled in a basement, running through " Last Train to Clarksville " and other hits of the day.

This isn’t the ’60s — it’s 2001. But the group rehearsing are a genuine ’60s garage band: they’re called the Monks, and they played all over Boston and the North Shore between 1965 and 1970. A couple of them stayed in the music biz; bassist Roger Kimball went on to play with Carly Simon and others. The lead singer — Brad Delp, later of Boston and Beatlejuice — became a rock star. And on this night, they’re doing exactly what they were doing 30-odd years ago: playing songs they love for the fun of it.

Delp counts off and they launch into " Mercy, Mercy, Mercy " — a tune by the Buckinghams (based on a Cannonball Adderley instrumental) that every self-respecting party band had to know in 1966. And the Monks merit the highest compliment you can give a ’60s cover band: they sound just like the record. If you’ve seen Delp with Beatlejuice — where he’s done songs associated with all four Beatles — you know how good he is at vocal impressions. At the rehearsal he sings a medley of " The Letter " and " Oh, Pretty Woman, " becoming a respective dead ringer for Alex Chilton and Roy Orbison. Only when they do " Clarksville " does the familiar, " More Than a Feeling " voice slip through.

" We used to rehearse in the garage, but the police would show up pretty regularly after 8 p.m., " notes Delp, who originally joined the band at age 14. " So after a while we moved to the Salem YMCA. I remember getting my picture in the Salem Evening News; they used to have a supplemental section where they’d write up a different teen band every week, and that was the first time I felt like I was famous. But before I joined Boston, the most I ever made for playing a gig was $60. Of course, that was a lot when gas was 23 cents a gallon. " The idea for an informal band reunion came about at the members’ 25th high-school reunion a few years back; they’ve rounded up five of the original members (out of eight people who passed through various line-ups).

Because they never made a record and mostly did covers, the Monks don’t show up in a lot of the local-music histories; one is more likely to hear about recording bands like the Remains or Orpheus. But the Monks were more typical of what happened in Boston, and everywhere else, in the mid ’60s: the Beatles played Ed Sullivan and suddenly there were bands in every garage. " That was it: the British Invasion hit and everybody went from playing Little League to playing guitars, " says Delp. And as Kimball points out, there were always perks to sounding even remotely like the Fab Four: " I was in a band using accordions to play Beatles songs, and the girls still screamed at us. " As for the Monks’ coincidence-ridden name, Delp says they chose it before the Monkees broke through. And no, they didn’t know about the other Monks — the band of US servicemen in Germany who made the cult-classic psychedelic album It’s Black Monk Time. At the time, hardly anyone did.

Being a local band in that era meant playing a real variety of gigs, from church dances to college mixers. " We played at Endicott College a lot, and we liked that because it was basically a girls’ school, " says Delp. They also got to open for Mitch Ryder and — wait for it — Sergeant Barry Sadler of " Ballad of the Green Berets " infamy. And Delp explains that they had a certain part of the local market cornered: " There were other bands around the North Shore, like the Warlocks, who did the bluesy Rascals/Stones thing. We were more known for doing the harmonies. Most of us saw the Beatles at Suffolk Downs in 1966; we had tickets but still jumped the fence to get in early. And we were known for doing an inordinate number of Beatles songs. " He now fronts Beatlejuice between Boston engagements — some things never change.

But there was a thin line between the bands who made it and the ones who didn’t. Delp recalls that in the early ’70s, he was involved in two projects: a post-Monks band with guitarist Bob Hayes and a project with guitarist/keyboardist Tom Scholz, who was making demos in his home studio. Nothing much happened with the latter, so Delp figured that the post-Monks band was the way to go. " Then Tom called one day and said, ‘Guess what, we’ve been signed.’  " The demos became the first Boston album and sold zillions of copies. Flash-forward to 2001 and Delp has long since wrapped up his vocals for the fifth Boston disc; now he’s waiting to hear when Scholz is ready to let it out and put the band on the road. A lot of things never change.

BOSSTOWN. If a band like the Monks summed up Boston in the mid ’60s, the " Bosstown Sound " bands represented the next phase — not to mention the first time local bands got screwed over by a record label. By now the story is more famous than the music: MGM Records comes to town circa 1968, signs up a bunch of bands, and proceeds to market the " Bosstown Sound " aggressively enough to scare the rest of the country away. (MGM is the same label that drops Frank Zappa for, gasp, using drugs — doubly ironic since he’s about the only ’60s figure that didn’t.) Most of the records flop, and it’s left to J. Geils and Aerosmith to pull Boston’s name out of the mud.

Almost all the " Bosstown " music has been out of print for three decades; a trio of new releases on the Varèse Sarabande label — a Best of the Boston Sound compilation, plus best-of’s by Ultimate Spinach and Orpheus — are the first CD reissues to come out in the US. They reveal that the bands weren’t bad, but they sure were idiosyncratic. What comes through is the overwhelming melancholy: if there was a Boston sound, it was downcast folk rock. The psychedelic influence is felt mainly in the ornate string arrangements (by MGM producer Alan Lorber, whose new liner notes are no less overstated) and in some truly odd lyrics: the Beacon Street Union’s " The Clown Died in Marvin Gardens " meshes images of doom, acid, and, uh, Monopoly.

The Boston compilation includes 18 tracks by as many bands, and there isn’t a full-fledged rocker in the batch. That’s partly a matter of licensing — the producers didn’t get anything by the Remains, or by Peter Wolf’s first band, the Hallucinations — but it leaves the impression that Boston bands spent the ’60s waiting for Prozac to be invented. Earnest vocals and sad, haunting tunes are the rule, with Ill Wind’s funereal " High Flying Bird " sounding like Jefferson Airplane on a death trip. Ultimate Spinach’s " Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess " anticipates the goth movement by three decades; the aptly named Head Game open a catchy tune with " Shackled by the ways of love within the house of rain/The madrigal of whispering, they say you offer pain. " Doesn’t appear that anyone in town has ever heard " Louie Louie. "

Not that there aren’t some gems in the batch. Orpheus were essentially a harmony pop group along the lines of the Association, and their " Can’t Find the Time " — the only national hit to come out of this era — remains a gorgeous record. As does " Violet Gown, " by the Lost (Willie Alexander’s first band) — a stylistic cousin to the Left Banke’s " Walk Away Renee. " Breaking the folk-rock mold were the Bagatelle (Willie Alexander’s second band), whose " Down on the Farm " would be a funky New Orleans–style tune if not for the dissonances in the horns. And Ultimate Spinach succeed through sheer weirdness: listen to " Your Head Is Reeling " — with its ominous organ, plainchant chorus, sitar, finger cymbals, and misplaced Kinks bass line — and you’ll hear a band who swallowed psychedelia whole.

By 1970, an entirely different Boston sound was brewing: the Velvet Underground (Willie Alexander’s third band, after Lou Reed left) lived here for a time and would be an influence for decades to come. More to the point, the Modern Lovers’ " Roadrunner " was recorded barely a year after the last Bosstown records and was everything they weren’t: trashy, raunchy, and full of joie de vivre. Revisit the Bosstown era and you’ll understand why Boston in the ’70s would be dominated by punk-rockers and garage bands — the punks were out to get even.

27. A Boston reissue of more recent vintage is getting a new lease on life this month. Founded by former Dirt Merchants singer Maria Christopher and ex-Spore guitarist Ayal Naor, the band 27 quietly released their debut album, Songs from the Edge of the Wing, on Naor’s Reproductive label two years ago. It was a lovely set of textural, stripped-down pop, with a fine cover of Neil Young’s " Dangerbird " for the finale. The disc has now been picked up as one of the inaugural releases from Release, a sister label of the metal-centered Relapse. And a vinyl version will come out on Escape Artist later this summer.

Only a thousand copies of the Reproductive version were pressed, so this will be the album’s first widespread release. " There’s one guy there that Ayal is friendly with; he loved the record and brainwashed the rest of the people at Relapse to put it out, " Christopher explains. " It’s funny, because the people who are into Relapse are usually the metalheads, but we’ve been getting some good response from them. So I guess people have varying tastes. " 27 are now finishing their second album, which will be released on Kimchee later this year; they’ll appear at the Middle East on August 7.