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**Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968**
★★★★★

The garage rock revival that exploded in the 1980s and continues to influence indie bands today can trace its DNA directly back to a single, revolutionary compilation that almost never happened. But let's start at the end of this story: by 1969, most of the bands featured on what would become "Nuggets" had already dissolved into the ether, their members returning to day jobs, college, or military service. The Standells were playing oldies circuits, The Electric Prunes had morphed into something unrecognizable, and The 13th Floor Elevators' Roky Erickson was battling demons both personal and legal. The psychedelic dream had curdled into the harder realities of the early '70s, leaving behind a scattered graveyard of forgotten 45s gathering dust in record store bargain bins.

Enter Lenny Kaye, a rock journalist and future Patti Smith Group guitarist, who in 1972 convinced Elektra Records to let him compile these "lost" gems into a double album. What Kaye assembled wasn't just a collection of obscure tracks—it was an archaeological dig into America's musical unconscious, unearthing the raw, unpolished id of the psychedelic era. The subtitle "Original Artyfacts" wasn't just a clever misspelling; it was a manifesto declaring these primitive recordings as legitimate art objects worthy of preservation and study.

Musically, "Nuggets" captures the moment when garage rock collided head-on with psychedelia, creating a sound that was simultaneously more innocent and more dangerous than either parent genre. These weren't the polished productions of The Beatles or the calculated rebelliousness of The Rolling Stones. This was pure teenage id translated into three-chord manifestos, recorded in makeshift studios with whatever equipment was available. The fuzz boxes were cranked to eleven, the organ lines were hypnotic, and the vocals ranged from sneering to pleading to completely unhinged.

The album's sequencing is masterful, opening with The Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)," a perfect encapsulation of the collection's aesthetic—dreamy yet menacing, psychedelic yet grounded in garage rock fundamentals. The Standells' "Dirty Water" follows as a sneering anthem that transforms Boston into a dystopian playground, while Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" delivers exactly what its title promises: five minutes of beautiful insanity built around a Yardbirds riff pushed to its breaking point.

Other standout tracks include The Seeds' "Pushin' Too Hard," a hypnotic exercise in minimalism that proves you don't need musical sophistication when you have pure attitude, and The 13th Floor Elevators' "You're Gonna Miss Me," featuring Roky Erickson's otherworldly howl backed by the band's signature electric jug. Mouse and the Traps' "A Public Execution" serves up garage rock as horror movie soundtrack, while The Chocolate Watchband's "Let's Talk About Girls" updates British Invasion swagger for the American suburbs.

What makes these tracks so compelling isn't their technical proficiency—many of these bands could barely play their instruments—but their absolute commitment to the moment. These were young musicians who had absorbed the sonic innovations of their more famous contemporaries and filtered them through their own limited resources and unlimited ambitions. The result was a sound that was more honest and immediate than much of the era's more celebrated output.

The compilation's influence cannot be overstated. It essentially created the concept of "garage rock" as a distinct genre and provided the blueprint for countless punk, indie, and alternative bands over the subsequent decades. The Ramones, Television, and R.E.M. all cited "Nuggets" as a formative influence, and you can draw direct lines from its aesthetic to everything from The White Stripes to modern psych-rock revivalists like Thee Oh Sees.

Today, "Nuggets" stands as perhaps the most influential compilation album ever assembled, a time capsule that managed to reshape the future by preserving the past. It proved that the most important music isn't always the most successful, and that sometimes the greatest artyfacts are the ones that almost got thrown away. In rescuing these forgotten gems from obscurity, Lenny Kaye didn't just compile an album—he rewrote rock history