Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era

Various Artists

album cover

A Secret History of '60s Rock

Explorers by nature, musicians are often the first to recognize the works discarded by previous generations. Many times their discoveries are private epiphanies, shared with a small circle of friends and fellow obsessives. Not so with Nuggets: In 1972, the record executive Jac Holzman and guitarist and music journalist Lenny Kaye (later an integral part of the Patti Smith Group) assembled what they considered the best American garage rock of the middle and late 1960s. Their initial double album (and the much-expanded four-CD box issued in 1998) spotlighted charttopping singles from one-hit wonders, minor regional bands that barely made the radio, and lots of devilishly inspired music in between.

The very first track, "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)," by the Electric Prunes, is a good example of the curatorial bent: A Top 20 hit in 1966, it's a snarly Stones-influenced rocker, with a hook that should have made it a classic. Its loose pulsating energy sets the tone for what follows: over a hundred three-minute blasts of attitude and musical acumen. Heard one after another, these disciplined and sometimes deliriously unruly tunes are footnotes to the Official History, the stuff that scholars focused on the Great Bands (the Beatles, Cream, the Rolling Stones, etc.) often miss. The Nuggets compilers aren't saying that the Swingin' Medallions are as important as Cream, just that the South Carolina band made a few songs like "Double Shot (of My Baby's Love)" that deserve a bit of bandwidth in the big time capsule.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1998, Rhino (Original issue 1972, Elektra)
Key Tracks: Sagittarius: "My World Fell Down." Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: "Diddy Wah Diddy." The Electric Prunes: "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)." The Sir Douglas Quintet: "She's About a Mover." The Knickerbockers: "Lies."
Buyer Beware: There are some Nuggets knockoffs on the market, and even Rhino's subsequent U.K.-oriented Nuggets II isn't as consistently strong.
Next Stop: The Sir Douglas Quintet: Mendocino
After That: The Dukes of Stratosphear: Psonic Psunspot
Book Pages: 816–817