405. Various, "Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era"

 


Everyone I know loves this collection, and what's not to love?  There's a ton of great proto-garage-rock here, the songs that really created the genre.  I can't imagine that bands like Thee Oh Sees and the Black Lips and the Vines weren't influenced by stuff on here.  There's the well-known - like "Dirty Water" and "Psychotic Reaction" - and the less well-known, but all the songs are pretty fucking great.

But here's what blew my mind: this collection, which purports to contain "artyfacts," came out in 1972.  1972!  And the songs on it are from 1964 to 1968!  So the long-forgotten artifacts were four to eight years old when this came out!  That would be like if I released a "Nuggets" today that had songs by Spoon and Panda Bear and Run the Jewels.  Not exactly dusty relics of a forgotten time!  I always thought this came out in, like, the 80s or something.  Wild.

You might think you know "Tobacco Road," but the version on here, by the Blues Magoos, includes a truly face-melting jam at the end.  There's a great cover of Buffalo Springfield's "Sit Down I Think I Love You" by now-forgotten San Francisco band The Mojo Men, who were not all Men, but rather had a female drummer/singer named Jan Errico, who was the cousin of the original drummer for Sly and the Family Stone.  She recorded her first song (in another band) when she was 12!  I would like to see a documentary about Jan Errico!

The album closes out with "Farmer John," a 1964 hit for the Premieres, one of the first Chicano bands to make it big, or sorta big, I guess.  It's a jam.

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