Back From the Grave

While many of the post-Nuggets efforts made it their goal to do further deep diving into general obscurities from 1960s American rock bands, the first volume of Tim Warren’s series Back From The Grave, released in 1984, had an even more specific brief: raw, distinctly unpolished but still blasting garage efforts made by never-even-slightly-famous acts responding to the British Invasion’s rougher side, with no hint of psychedelia whatsoever. Like the subtitle says, it’s all ‘rockin’ 1966 punkers’ all the time, and often it’s just that in a truly stereotypical sense given various dudes ranting and/or complaining about their girlfriends or objects of lust. But Warren’s hilariously combative liner notes and band histories, often with help from the acts themselves, made for a great resource, and he started the series with a hell of a sonic bang from various diamonds in the rough. Among the many highlights: kicking off with the One Way Streets’s food ode “We All Love Peanut Butter,” the chaotically voiced Erich Von Zipper tribute “Rat’s Revenge” by, indeed, the Rats (aka the Decades), the Swamp Rats’s gloriously feedback-laden “Psycho” and the Fabs’s strutting stomp “The Bag I’m In,” with the unusual lyrical claim “The only money I’ve got is Chinese yen.”