The Nuggets Legacy

Somewhere between a historical document and a mixtape – appropriate given that it emerged via Memphix, a collective of DJs and funk collectors, notably including writer/archivist Dante Cafagna – Chains and Black Exhaust, first released in 2003 and then with a slightly different tracklisting in 2008, became something of a cause celebre. It can easily be seen as a kind of Nuggets for Black rock acts of the late 60s and early to mid 70s, gathering barely-heard singles and cuts by performers turned on by the blazing example of Jimi Hendrix and the mutating approaches of the Isley Brothers and the P-Funk universe among many more. That said, a big difference to Nuggets, though not a unique one in the free-for-all of the post-Napster universe, was a complete lack of liner notes and tracklisting on top of its bootleg status, though with time more information was readily dug up and shared online. Regardless, it’s a feast of wah-wah, deep funk, and general fire. One track, the shaggy dog sauciness of “The Devil Made Me Do It” by Curtis Knight Zeus, has a hell of a family tree: frontman Knight himself had performed with pre-fame Hendrix while lead guitarist Eddie Clarke was just a couple of years away from joining the classic Motorhead lineup.

By 1999 it had almost been thirty years of Nuggets-inspired compilations mania where seemingly everything under that rubric that could be reissued had been, good, bad or indifferent, as were a fair amount of the compilations in turn. But there was still plenty to investigate, and Dionysus Records founder Lee Joseph, via the Bacchus Archives sublabel, kicked off a new series with all kinds of American-grown 60s garage and psych madness featured on the first volume of Fuzz, Flaykes, & Shakes, boldly claiming it was a ‘remedy’ to so much sonic sludge that had emerged via a set of prime obscurities. The results backed up the brass, with good liner notes from Mike Stax adding to the value. Starting with the guitar and organ insanity of “I Can See The Light” by the Glass Sun, other strong moments include the quick pace and groove and backwards guitar solo of “Things” by the Rites and the earnest freneticism and (presumably) intentionally weird mix of Time of Your Life’s appropriately titled “Ode To A Bad Dream.” A notable bummer of a song: “Dialated Eyes” by the Gregorians, detailing an abusive family household plagued by alcoholism, backed by an arrangement with both fuzz and, on the melancholic breaks, flute.

Though in the UK punk was often initially talked up as a grassroots music for the people, in ways it was down to many others – not all punk-as-such – that either took direct inspiration from the idea or recalibrated what they were already doing to fully kick in that promise in what was termed a do-it-yourself or D.I.Y. scene, with an explosion of releases soon following in the country in the late seventies. Twenty years later, collector and fan Chuck Warner, following an initial series of eight Messthetics CDRs starting in 1999, the title referencing an early song by famed D.I.Y. avatars Scritti Politti, started a formally-released series on the time and place with the archly titled 2006 overview Messthetics Greatest Hits. Warner’s sharp choices and excellent liner notes make the case for songs, however amateurish or cheaply recorded – notably what drum sounds there are are mostly early drum machines or very lightly miked – that escaped wider attention at the time. The engaging “We Love Malcolm” (as in McDowell) by O Level, by future underground/Creation Records stalwarts Dan Treacy, Ed Ball and Joe Foster, kicks it off, and the engaging, loopily snarky and enjoyably catchy oddness from acts like the Digital Dinosaurs and Instant Automatons among many others make it a crucial listen.

One of the first direct descendants of the legendary Nuggets compilation first appeared six years later in 1978 as a shadowy bootleg, aiming to ape its predecessor in terms of intriguing range, unearthed obscurities and informative liner notes, but notably bedeviled by various mastering problems that later CD editions just made even more weirdly complicated thanks to incorrect track listings. In any form, though, the debut volume of Pebbles is a stone cold classic of the obsessive 60s garage/psych collecting field, essentially pasting a new slew of American songs into the expanding canon. The opening “Action Woman” by the Litter alone is a noisy blast of Who/Yardbirds worship, if, like so many of the songs, more than a little lunkheaded lyrically – perhaps it was appropriate the original compilation’s release ended with the Wilde Knights’ trashy-but-catchy-as-hell “Beaver Patrol.” Like its inspiration, Pebbles is handy in showing that there wasn’t any one sound among these acts but a variety, from the Floyd Dakil Combo’s peppy “Dance Franny Dance” to the Split Ends’ reverb-swamped stomp on “Rich With Nothin.’” A truly wonderfully weird entry: the Shadows of Knight’s “Potato Chip,” originally released as a five-inch cardboard record promoting, well, exactly that.

Rhino’s codification and expansion of Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets compilation across two extensive box sets gained a 2005 conclusion with another four CD effort, Children of Nuggets, a perhaps fitting coda in celebrating any number of bands from around the world during the rest of the 20th century that took inspiration in part or even in whole from Kaye’s legendary first survey of 60s garage and psych sounds. With its aim being a general worldwide portrait – if essentially Anglophilic, drawing on the US, UK and Australia and New Zealand, though with a few contenders from the strong Swedish and Finnish scene of the 1980s as well – Children of Nuggets touches on a huge swathe of the major bands and performers that could fit the general bill of some form of those sounds, though among its contestable absences are R.E.M. and the Spacemen 3 and Loop family trees among many others its creators acknowledged couldn’t fit the box as it stood. Even so, it’s absolutely an embarrassment of riches, from higher profile bands like the Cramps, the Bangles, the Church, Primal Scream and XTC (inevitably but rightfully appearing in their explicitly Nuggets-crazed Dukes of Stratosphear guise) to underground legends like the Mummies, the Fleshtones, the Pandoras and the Bevis Frond.

It was perhaps the ultimate compliment to Nuggets and its long impact that three decades after its initial release, a new CD bootleg series looking at intriguing obscurities and one-offs from a group of American mid to late 1960s-into-1970s acts began by exploring its seeming sonic polar opposite – folkish contemplations, calm but still peppy grooves, gentle trippiness, sunshine pop ease and dawn of Laurel Canyon vibes. But the first volume of Soft Sounds For Gentle People, appearing in 2003, in some ways was a mirror funhouse version of the Nuggets universe, with plenty of the featured bands or performers having direct or indirect connections via producers, songwriters or being veterans of the scene as such. Thorough liner notes from its unknown compilers provide a lot of the details from there, but the real treat is of course the music itself, with a focus mostly but not entirely on California acts. The David Axelrod-produced “I Think I’ll Just Go And Find Me A Flower” by Moorpark Connection sets the tone elegantly, and from there it’s a well-sequenced amble. One of the most surprising entries comes near the start: the understated string-swept proto-funk “Naturally Stoned” by the Avant Garde, an actual top 40 hit from a band featuring future TV host and crank Chuck Woolery.

To say that Japan’s several decades-deep rock and roll history is absolutely worth further exploring in general is a truism, but after an early 60s mania for surf music and before the numerous wild and wonderfully strange 1970s groups and albums that took guitar freakery to new heights, the mid-sixties Beatles-inspired wave known as ‘group sounds’ was generally seen to be well-scrubbed and sweetly melodic clones of the Fab Four and its compatriots, beholden to the major labels that held absolute sway. On the Australian-originated 1996 bootleg CD Banzai Freakbeat, its anonymous compilers aimed to showcase a ‘rawer breed’ more amenable to the Nuggets vein of listeners worldwide, pulling together both the wilder side of the bigger acts and more obscure bands both, often relying on obscure compilations, live recordings or B-sides. As was often the case with many non-Anglophonic scenes, covers of UK and American favorites appear throughout, but there are plenty of striking originals worth noting, including Jacks’s moody “She’s a Good Old Girl” and the legendary guitarist Takeshi Terauchi-featuring Bunnys tearing up a live take of “Little Devil.”  Though the fine liner notes really could have used a much bigger font size – no joke! – Banzai Freakbeat fulfills its brief fully otherwise.

After Rhino’s expansion of Lenny Kaye’s original 1972 Nuggets compilation into a four CD box that added three times as many selections from the wide American underground of that era, the same core creative team, led by Gary Stewart and Alec Palao with the contributions of many others, came up with a remarkable similarly-sized sequel in 2001’s Nuggets II set. Per the subtitle, its main focus is on the UK’s equivalent scenes and standouts, mostly featuring acts that rarely if ever followed in the way of the British Invasion’s more successful exports. Yet songs from a wide number of countries, from Uruguay to Japan to Czechoslovakia and more, flesh out Nuggets II to create a reasonable overview of the rich mod, garage & psychedelic scenes that seemed to be bursting out everywhere at the time. Singling out even a small number of tracks doesn’t do the set proper justice, but covering everything from the work of soon-to-be-legends – to note just one example, David Bowie appears in his mod-era Davy Jones & The Lower Third guise – to striking local heroes like Australia’s The Masters Apprentices and the Netherlands’ Q65 makes the set a rich listen, both in its own right and as a launching point for deeper dives.

Lenny Kaye might not have expected it to happen but a downside of so much of the compilations that followed in the wake of his famed Nuggets compilation implicitly argued one key thing his own work inadvertently suggested: that 60s American garage and early psych rock, however defined, was the province of dudes only. The anonymous compiler of the excellent sounding bootleg series Girls In The Garage was having none of it, as was clear in their enjoyable liner notes, and the debut effort in 1987 was an absolute treat and a half. Starting with the spirited harmonica-tinged kick of Denise and Co.’s “Take Me As I Am,” the various selections showed that the women of the scene often gave as good as they got from all the guys, though not without a few songs that were more straightforwardly lovelorn. (Further, the involvement of Kim Fowley on the last two entries doesn’t help, especially in retrospect.) With plenty of girl-group-adjacent sass adding to the proceedings throughout, there’s also a solid musical range at work, from the nasty guitar snarl of the Luv’d Ones’s “Up Down Sue” to the stop-start fun of the Belles’s “Come Back” (pity their gender-flipped rework of “Gloria,” “Melvin,” didn’t make the cut) to the bright edge of the Bittersweets’ “Hurtin’ Kind” to the jittery “The Girl He Needs,” coolly sung by Lydia Marcelle.

Given the many landmark German rock bands that emerged in the 1970s and beyond, the 1960s had gotten short shrift in comparison in wider critical circles – more than a little unfair, considering how many of those groups’ members had gotten their start then. 1994’s debut volume of Prae-Kraut Pandaemonium, the first of an open-ended series, aimed to right the balance in classic post-Nuggets fashion: a homegrown bootleg, certainly, but with detailed liner notes (in English, like the majority of the tracks featured) via its three compilers providing a deeper look at some of the stranger corners of a thriving scene. Would you believe a bright-sounding, sunningly-sung tribute record called “Jimi Hendrix” recorded by an already-established Catholic priest/recording artist named Kaplan Flury, much less a groovy organ-led soundtrack song by Improved Sound Ltd. entitled “Leave This Lesbian World”? Then there’s Malepartus II’s German-language take on Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming To Take Me Away,” a trip in and of itself, and the promises of a sometimes-ranting alien providing ‘atmospheric loving’ on the Blackbirds’s moody, uptempo groover “Space.” But perhaps the most amazing lyrically is the engaging “Heart Transplantation” by the Dragons, which, indeed, is introduced straight-facedly as a history of Dr. Christiaan Barnard’s breakthrough medical procedure from 1968.

Peru’s mid to late 1960s rock and roll scene was an explosion of activity, understandably enough centered around its capital city of Lima, featuring both adaptations of Anglophonic favorites, often instrumentally, and a number of original efforts. But that said, its participants had to wait until towards the late 1990s for wider worldwide attention via both a number of initial reissues and, simultaneously, its own Nuggets. A 1999 bootleg CD specifically drawing on singles rather than album cuts, Sons of Yma has a reasonably good presentation, with a design featuring many local label logos, a detailed introduction from its anonymous compilers, and further liner notes from Peruvian listeners and fans providing more information about the acts where known, along with apologies at a couple of points for sound quality (which honestly isn’t that bad). Perhaps understandably the standout tracks are from the now retrospectively legendary Los Saicos, whose killer, growled originals “Come On” and the Trashmen-like “Demolicion” really do seem like they invented punk rock a decade in advance. But there’s plenty of general joy at work, from the engaging surf rock reworkings by Los Holy’s to the fired-up clip of Los Shains and Los Yorks and the psych-into-prog leanings of Traffic Sound.

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.”

While the Killed By Death series was arguably a Nuggets for the late-seventies-and-after punk generation, focusing on obscurities and general oddities for an uncommercial scene to start with, its nature put it more in line with series like Pebbles and Boulders: bootleg rather than properly licensed and generally rougher all around. It ended up becoming a subcultural legend several times over, though, and its first volume, one of the initial ones compiled and annotated by Johan Kugelberg, established its reputation out of the gate. Its most famed numbers are the many early Beastie Boys tracks, later properly rereleased by the (understandably annoyed) band on Some Old Bullshit, but the remaining cuts include some real winners. Kicking in with Mad’s sax-touched thrashing snarl “I Hate Music” is perfectly appropriate and goonily hilarious, while choice cuts by the Wipers, Vox Pop and the Controllers among others keep the energy level on a real high. There’s no question that a number of the featured acts verged if not fully crossed over to the willfully offensive – two separate tracks about the Hillside Strangler, one by the band the Child Molesters, is example enough. So if the collection is partially a demonstration of jokes that didn’t age well (or weren’t much funny to start with), it’s still useful context.

The dawn of the 21st century found a new interest in the international garage/psych world for a particular late 60s/early to mid 70s scene in Turkey that hadn’t traveled too much beyond its borders at the time, even though a fair number of its acts were notable domestic hitmakers. 2001’s Hava Narghile, released as an initial volume in a series though no followup ever appeared, was an excellent introduction via the Bacchus Archives label, with compilers Gökhan Aya and Jay Dobis providing much information and fascinating detail in their liner notes and featuring many standout acts like Erkin Koray, Baris Manço and Mogollar. Anglophonic influences were understandably key, in sometimes surprising fashion – at one point it’s noted that the obscure US band the Id had a notable hit in the country with “Short Circuit,” leading to covers like the included “Sasirdim” by Kaygisizlar, while little surprise that what often sounds like surf-derived music at points might more appropriately be called a wider regional feedback loop thanks to the Lebanese-descended Dick Dale. There were plenty of wholly homegrown traditions drawn on in turn, with the distinct sound of electrified versions of the saz, a form of lute that had been used for centuries in Turkish music, playing a notable role in many of the recordings.

UK glam rock in its early to mid 1970s heyday was so hugely popular and influential when it came to its flagship artists and acts, becoming a beloved touchstone for decades at home and beyond, that it took 2003’s Velvet Tinmine, rereleased with a slightly different tracklist in 2009, to demonstrate, Nuggets-style, that there were also a fair amount of interesting never-quite-wases as well. Compiled and annotated by a troika of musician/writer obsessives, Philip King, Bob Stanley and Mark Stafford, Velvet Tinmine brought the concept of ‘junkshop glam’ into the discourse, the album’s title a funnily appropriate riff on both the David Bowie song “Velvet Goldmine” and the Todd Haynes glam fantasia that followed some decades later. In either edition it kicks off with a real monster: the aggro-Sweet, finger-snapping and heavy-stomping “Rebels Rule” by the brilliantly named Iron Virgin. After that it’s a happy slumgullion of plenty of familiar elements that all do seem like they should have been hits, however secondhand: shriekalong lyrics, blaring synths alongside the drums and retro-50s moves, and big-sounding production even if on often smaller budgets. The excellent liner notes talk about a slew of names that would gain more attention later, like producer Martin Rushent and cult musicians like Martin Newell and Simon Fisher Turner, as well as honestly tragically-fated figures like the Bowie disciple Brett Smiley.

The first volume of the Rubble series from 1984, also entitled The Psychedelic Snarl, served as a key entry into the post-Nuggets world, not just due to its clear focus on the UK in particular. Compiler Phil Smee, via the Bam Caruso label, absolutely aimed to shine a strong light on his own country’s array of 60s psych-era oddities and not-quite-hits, with a healthy dose of acts who had come up through mod and related scenes to put their own inspired spin on things that were truly a long distance away from the mythical American garage. But like Lenny Kaye did on his landmark compilation, Smee not only had properly mastered and licensed tracks but also provided detailed liner notes, helping to fix a slew of acts more firmly into history, perhaps most notably Wimple Witch, with no less than three songs featured showing off their blend of hard-edged kick and harmony-led breaks. Other notable entries included the Living Daylights’s brightly sung and killer chorus on “Let’s Live For Today,” the American expatriates the Misunderstood delivering bluesy queasiness with “Never Had a Girl Like You Before” and Open Mind’s none-more-trippy acid guitar groover “Magic Potion,” which asks “If you don’t want to try this potion, leave it all for me!”

When a 60s garage/psych compilation includes a track called “Susie’s Gone” featuring a lead vocalist intoning a heavily echoed word or two at a time over a spooky skeletal jam that simultaneously sounds like a haunted house and a trip to space – and then later features a dimly-echoing song called “Burritt Bradley” from a totally separate group set to a heartbeat and with its own spoken word lyrics running “I once had a physical body…and then I gave it up when I died” – you know you’re in for a good time. 1990’s Beyond the Calico Wall was compiler/liner note writer Erik Lindgren’s first of many notable Nuggets-style deep dives he oversaw over the decades and he absolutely came in strong, adding a bit of indulgence with a new project of his own, the Demons of Negativity. With an organ-crazed and feedback-laden rampage by Park Avenue Playground, “The Trip” (not the Kim Fowley song) starting the mania, it barely breaks for air throughout, including the blazing “Up In My Mind” by the Spontaneous Generation and a somehow even more insane version of “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” by Rasputin & the Mad Monks. Killer line from the Flower Power’s “Mt. Olympus”: “Mt. Olympus stands like a rock in the sea/And nothing makes it real except reality.”

The ultimate in an inspired random idea for retrospection becoming a foundational document, Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets compilation for Elektra Records in 1972 remains a remarkable effort, pulling together a slew of mid-sixties one-offs, including both actual major chart hits and a few near-misses, to perhaps unintentionally codify a core vision of American rock of the era, covering everything from frat rock frugs to Bob Dylan and Beach Boys rips to garagey British Invasion responses to, indeed, wigged-out psychedelia and much more besides. Nearly everything on it has become subsequently famous as markers of the time and place, not to mention covered more times than can be counted by both earnest revivalists and less scenebound acts just wanting to kick out the jams in their own way. (Would you believe that the seeming arch-goths of Bauhaus once covered the Strangeloves’ “Night Time,” for instance?) From the snotty punches of the Standells’ “Dirty Water” and the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” to the winsomely-sung “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” by the Mojo Men, from the opening cut trippiness of the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” to the concluding moody rumble of “It’s-a-Happening” by the Magic Mushrooms, it’s one heck of a good time. (Rhino’s 1998 expansion of the original into a four CD set made it an even more commanding overview, drawing on both their 1980s Nuggets series as well as many cuts featured on later compilations that used Nuggets as their own origin point for their deeper dives.)

One of the most notable compilation series that kicked off in the wake of Nuggets was the UK-based Chocolate Soup For Diabetics, with its first effort dropping in 1980. While it did bring a light to a wide number of undeservedly obscure acts from the heyday of guitar-heavy UK psychedelia in the late 1960s to a new audience, it still suffered on a few fronts thanks to its bootleg status combined with barely any liner notes. Phil Smee’s Rubble series a few years later did much better there, but Chocolate Soup’s debut was still a strong artifact that had its place, not least due to its properly groovy cover art which became a hallmark of later volumes. A standout was the light shone on Tintern Abbey, with two of their strongest songs, “Vacuum Cleaner” and “Beeside,” getting the nod. The relocated Americans the Misunderstood were properly included with their wild masterpiece “Children of the Sun” while the killer Zoot Money curio (in his Dantalian’s Chariot guise) “The Madman Running Through The Fields” follows right on its heels. Other strong cuts include the rampaging opener “The Train to Disaster” by the Voice and the Flies’s slow, heavy and exultant take on “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone.”

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.