40 Years Later Lenny Kaye and Nuggets

 
Nuggets Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968

I’ve written¹ about my love for garage band music, and this compilation previously, but 40 years later, the Nuggets set² still rocks.

Before he would achieve recognition as the guitarist for Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye wrote reviews and articles for Rolling Stone in its early years and was hired as a freelance talent scout by Elektra Records in 1970. During that period, Elektra president Jac Holzman told Kaye about a record he wanted put out consisting of songs that were either hidden on records or minor hit singles. The result? Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968.

“In a way, it seemed to me that these songs were in a twilight zone,” Kaye tells Spinner, “between what was then the AM format — catchy three-minute singles with a good chorus and a hook — and the more expansive album-oriented music that developed in the ’60s when all these artistic parameters were kind of pushed aside, and a certain sense of possibility came into the music where you could think expansively and imaginatively beyond certain time lengths and song lengths and song constructs. Having lived through it as a teenager, I felt very much connected with it in terms of my own artistic growth and what I could see as the possibilities within music.”

With songs selected by Kaye and released in 1972, Nuggets became a classic garage rock album featuring bands that never achieved long-lasting fame. In marking the record’s 40th anniversary this year, Rhino Records reissued the original set as a single CD (it was previously released as an expanded 4-CD boxed set in 1998).

(click here to continue reading Lenny Kaye and ‘Nuggets’: 40 Years of a ‘High-Class Oldies Album’ – Spinner.)

Hypnotic Beat of Your Band.jpg

The sequel, Nuggets 2³ is quite worthy as well.

Two words on the shrink-wrap sticker on “Nuggets II,” a Rhino Records box set, say it all: The collection, four CDs each running more than an hour, contains “no hits.”

In the record industry — heck, even in the world of box sets, which are often filled with filler — this would seem to be apostasy. No hits? Why would anybody want to buy a box set with no hits? You may as well manufacture CD-sized Frisbees.

But there is a method to Rhino’s madness. After all, this box set follows in the tradition of “Nuggets,” four CDs of 1960s American garage band music from the same era, based on the famous 1972 double-LP compiled by Lenny Kaye.

That box set ran the gamut from national hits — the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction,” the Beau Brummels’ “Laugh Laugh” — to regional obscurities such as the Merry-Go-Round’s “Live” and the Sonics’ “Strychnine,” all celebrating the DIY ethic of countless Beatles/Stones wannabes.

 It also surprised the heck out of Rhino (a division of AOL Time Warner, as is CNN.com).

“It sold four or five times what I expected,” says the label’s vice president of A&R, Gary Stewart, noting that sales tallied about 45,000 copies. (Sales of 20,000 copies of a box set is considered good.) The popularity of “Nuggets” cemented a decision, made even before “Nuggets” hit the stores, to do a sequel.

But what to focus on? Stewart and his colleagues decided to do anything but more American indie rock.

“We realized, rather than go to the next level of garage rock, there was a whole other world out there,” he says — a world of 1960s rock songs from locales ranging from Great Britain to Iceland, Peru and Czechoslovakia.

And so “Nuggets II” began, a box set that would feature more than 100 songs most Americans had never heard of.

…

What is on “Nuggets II” is still a record collector’s dream. There are bands that were big in their native countries, such as the Move, that never had a U.S. hit. There are bands that featured future stars (the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood in the Birds, Yes’ Steve Howe in Tomorrow) and bands that were obscure even in their native lands.

 Best of all are the songs themselves. Sure, there are a couple recognizable tunes — “Friday on My Mind” and “Pictures of Matchstick Men” — but many are classics from Uruguay, the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain that likely would have been lost if not for Stewart and his merry band.

 

(click here to continue reading CNN.com – The making of a box set with ‘no hits’ – March 6, 2002.)

Pick up a copy of either if you can…

Footnotes:

1. probably [↩]
2. officially called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968  [↩]
3. officially known as Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond [↩]