Nuggets

I was listening to Lenny Kaye's show on Sirius/XM's Underground Garage and was reminded that, aside from being the long-time guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, he also was responsible for the albums known as Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. 

I have the boxed set of four volume of Nuggets, which comes with a booklet full of essays that would occupy an entire rainy afternoon of reading, but it was the first volume, released in 1972, that made a big splash in the music world. Kaye was a clerk at a Greenwich Village record store (remember those?) at the time, working with Jac Holzman, founder of Electra Records. The boxed set was put out by Rhino Records.

The songs chosen for the album were not "nuggets" in that they were difficult to find--many of them where hits, but in that they were perfectly polished records that bridged the gap between garage rock and psychedelia. The album became influential for the burgeoning punk rock scene--Kaye's liner notes included one of the first uses of the phrase "punk rock."

It's fascinating to see the hybridization of the genres, especially in the band names. Many of the bands here have the usual definite article, plural noun names: The Standells, The Strangeloves, The Knickerbockers, The Vagrants, The Barbarians, The Seeds, The Remains, The Magicians, The Castaways, The Leaves, The Amboy Jukes, The Premiers. Then the names were tweaked with psychedelia: The Electric Prunes, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Magic Mushrooms. Then they dropped the plural: The Nazz. Finally the article was dropped: Sagittarius.

The sound is distinctive. It contains the elements of garage rock--the basic guitar, bass, and drums, but advancing into with the use of electric keyboards and guitar distortion and  feedback, which was the sonic element that differentiated psychedelia (the attitude was something quite altogether).

The very first track, "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night," by The Electric Prunes, is a perfect example. The song begins with a bee-like hum that was produced by reversing the guitar, adding fuzztone and a wiggle stick. Another key track is "Psychotic Reaction," by Count Five, one of the first successful psychedelic (or acid rock) songs.

Back then, these songs weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. Several of them are staples on '60s radio: "Sugar and Spice," by The Cryan' Shames, "Lies," by The Knickerbockers, "Liar Liar," by The Castaways, or "Pushin' Too Hard," by The Seeds (for a lot of laughs, look up their appearance on the sit-com The Mothers-in-Law). One song I've never heard anywhere else is really a novelty song: "Moulty," by The Barbarians (who had a hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?", certainly a proto-punk song). Moulty was a drummer who had a hook for a hand, and he tells us how he overcame adversity and  followed his dreams, and wants "a real girl, who really loves me." I wonder if he found her.

Some of the tracks are covers that were done more famously by others: "Respect," by The Vagrants, "Hey Joe," from The Leaves, "Tobacco Road," from Blue Magoos, and The Amboy Jukes version of the old blues song, "Baby Please Don't Go." Some of the artists are shameless "homages" to other artists, such as Mouse doing the very Bob Dylanesque "A Public Execution," The Remains sounding very much like The Rolling Stones in "Don't Look Back," and Sagittarius doing the Beach Boys with "My World Fell Down."

Nuggets seemed not to have charted, but like groups such as The Velvet Underground, the influence was on musicians, who listened and started their own bands. By 1966-67, when The Beatles made psychedelia respectable with "Revolver" and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the artists who would start punk in New York and London were still poring over songs like these. Some of the artists on these records would go on to be very big, such as Todd Rundgren from The Nazz, Ted Nugent of The Amboy Jukes, and Al Kooper of The Blues Project.

For anyone interested in the origins of punk rock, or the best of garage rock, this album is a must. It was also included in Rolling Stone's 500 best albums of all time.