Boulders: The Sixties Punk Album

Like its near contemporary Pebbles, Boulders was a compilation series that very much used the original Nuggets set as its raison d’etre for a focus on even obscurer 1960s American garage and psych efforts. Also like Pebbles, Boulders was very much a bootleg affair, but its initial entry in 1980 made up for that with a sharp collection of sometimes inspired one-offs from bands that were local legends, at least in their own minds and scenes. Kicking off with the quick hard-edged r’n’b blast of the Jolly Green Giants’ “Caught You Red Handed,” Boulders is also useful as a demonstration of how recording and engineering standards could vary wildly. Even murky numbers like “Chocolate Moose Theme” by (of course) Chocolate Moose can give a sense of what these bands could be like, though, and nearly everything’s a romp, with high-energy rippers, more than a few vamps about dealing with life and the workaway world and plenty of freaky guitar and organ jams. As per usual, there’s plenty of lyrics that can safely be called unenlightened, like those of “Be a Cave Man” by the Avengers, but the merrily ridiculous spoken/sung “Scream Mother Scream” by Sur Royal Da Count and the Parliaments is more universal when it comes to getting woken up for school in the morning.