E-Mail This Article to a Friend POWER CHORDS John Kerry energizes his bass BY MIKE MILIARD

Is there anything John Kerry hasn’t done? He’s a presidential candidate, a senator, a war hero, an anti-war activist, a former prosecutor, a onetime lieutenant governor, an erstwhile ladies’ man, a waterfowl hunter, a hockey player, a snowboarder, a wind surfer, a cyclist, an all-around bon vivant. He met JFK and John Lennon. He had a cameo on Cheers and was inked into a panel or two of Doonesbury. And, back in the early ’60s (’round about the time that George W. Bush was hollerin’ into a megaphone as an Andover cheerleader), John Kerry was a rock star.

Sort of. As you may have known, when Kerry was a teenager at tony Saint Paul’s School in New Hampshire, he played bass in a garage band known as the Electras (a perfecto garage-band name if ever there was one). They actually put out a homonymous full-length record, with back-cover liner notes and everything, in 1961. But there were just 500 copies pressed, and since then they’ve become highly sought-after commodities. (At least one LP was being hawked for two grand on eBay earlier this year.)

Luckily, the Electras’ master tapes were rescued recently from some dusty vault, and their remastered debut has just been reissued on CD. You can purchase it through www.theelectras.com/ for just $14. But be warned, fortune seekers: the yellowed originals might have been selling online for beaucoup bucks, but the reissues are fetching a mere $8, on average. These are hardly the lost schoolboy tapes of Mick ’n’ Keith, after all. Still, the Electras aren’t half-bad. They sound pretty much how you’d expect a septet of earnest 17-year-old rock-and-roll fans to sound. There are shaky but spirited covers of Duane Eddy’s "Because They’re Young" and Lee Dorsey’s "Ya Ya." There’s some twangy surf-rock riffage, some scratchy blues licks. And Kerry’s bass playing is serviceable — he keeps good time and provides ample low end, getting especially down and dirty on a cover of Dee Clark’s "You Can’t Sit Down."

If you’re not yet sold, visit www.kerryrocks.com for a free seven-minute-long MP3 sampling the Electras’ oeuvre. Even better, take part in the site’s contest encouraging wordsmiths to fuse their own lyrics to the Electras’ decades-old riffs to create new tunes, preferably ones having to do with the election (and, uh, ideally pro-Kerry). Some of the results so far are better than you might suspect. On "Times Are Changing," rapper Sight looks toward a better future under a new JFK, laying beats and rhymes over the crackly swoon of the Electras’ cover of Santo & Johnny’s hypnotic "Sleepwalk." And Daniel Mackenzie goofs over a reverb-soaked 12-bar instrumental with his "Kerry in 2004!", which sounds like a peppy early-’60s campaign jingle:

Election day is coming and it’s almost here!

The future of the world will be decided this year!

We either choose to live in fear, always on the attack!

Or we elect a better man and get our country back!

So vote for Kerry! Kerry in 2004! Waaaaaaaooogh!

Try it yourself, but get crackin’: the contest ends at midnight on Sunday, October 31. The prize? A trip to Washington, DC, and the chance to step on stage with the Electras at their 45th-anniversary reunion show, slated for the third week of January 2005. If you hadn’t noticed, that’s just about the time of inauguration day.