The Greatest Rock Compilation Ever Made?

Lenny Kaye is best known as Patti Smith's guitarist. But his greatest contribution to music history may actually be an earth-shattering collection of garage and psych tunes called Nuggets.

Lenny Kaye was still a student at Rutgers University when he took the name Link Cromwell and waxed one 45 in 1966. It received modest attention and was never a hit. But the one-off garage tune did hint at Kaye’s true passion.

Kaye was far more impactful as a New York scenester than as a musician in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, writing prolifically for Jazz & Pop, Fusion, Crawdaddy, Melody Maker, Creem, and Rolling Stone while clerking at the Village Oldies record shop on Bleecker Street.

In fact, he was working a shift when fellow New Jersey native Patti Smith wandered in and made his acquaintance. They would soon after play their first gig together, with Lenny providing musical accompaniment for a church poetry reading in February of ‘71.

Together, Smith and Kaye were still four years away from recording their groundbreaking debut LP—Horses. But in 1972, Lenny Kaye would make a seismic impact on the course of music without strumming a note.

The Missing Link

Working directly alongside Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, Kaye was tasked with a formidable challenge. He was to assemble a collection of garage rock and psychedelic songs that captured the raw, raucous, excessive spirit of the late ‘60s.

But as Kaye began unearthing buried treasures, the true challenge proved distilling this collection down to just a few of the most representative artifacts. To wit, Kaye originally envisioned a series of 8 LPs capturing the era in full florid panorama. Holzman compelled him to narrow his scope to a more commercially viable two-disc compilation.

The result was Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, a collection of songs from 1965 to 1968 that resurrected the primitive thumping, the searing fuzztones, and the bong-rattling bass of the era with absolute precision.

Open My Eyes

Nuggets proved a perfect sampler, capturing a bit of everything that made this period so exciting and so fleeting: the burning, lysergic intensity (“Psychotic Reaction” by the Count Five); the daisy-chain sunshine pop (“My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius); the urgent proto-punk (“Pushing Too Hard” by the Seeds); the suburban white-boy R&B (“Respect” by the Vagrants); the high-school gymnasium stomp (“Farmer John” by the Premiers); and whatever you’d call this stoned-out classic by The Hombres.

Future rock radio stars also lurk in the liner notes—Mountain’s Leslie West sang lead for the Vagrants; Todd Rundgren cut his teeth with the Nazz; Ted Nugent fired his first shots as lead guitarist for the Amboy Dukes.

And major radio hits (“Dirty Water” by the Standells reached #11 in ‘66) sit alongside obscure singles that might have been lost entirely to history if not for the Nuggets compilation, like the Magic Mushrooms’ “It’s-A-Happening”.

It’s Actually Not A-Happening

A quick aside on the Magic Mushrooms:

This Philly-based garage band assembled at the University of Pennsylvania and managed to ink a deal with A&M records while still in school. The “A” in A&M stands for Alpert—as in Herb Alpert. Of course, before co-founding A&M with Jerry Moss, Herb Alpert recorded prolifically as the trumpeter and bandleader for the Tijuana Brass.

At any rate, when the Magic Mushrooms recorded “It’s-A-Happening” in 1966, Alpert had no idea what magic mushrooms were. Then somebody told him, and he was not a fan. Alpert demanded that the Mushrooms change their name.

“It’s-A-Happening” debuted at #93 on the Billboard Hot 100. But when the band refused Alpert’s demand, A&M pulled their single from distribution. They fell off the charts after one week. They were forgotten at best, entirely unheard at worst.

But Lenny Kaye’s dedication to exhuming lost classics changed the course of history for songs like “It’s-A-Happening”. The long-gone Magic Mushrooms found themselves included on a compilation that sold robustly.

The Crate-Digger’s Bible

In fact, the story of the Magic Mushrooms is just one of dozens that might never have been told were it not for Kaye’s efforts, his thorough research, and his illuminating liner notes (which, it bears noting, include one of the earliest uses of the word “punk” as a musical descriptor).

Nuggets also touched off a new era of foraging and crate-digging for passionate record collectors. Kaye didn’t just shine a light on the songs that were included in his box set. He showed us the tip of the iceberg. He demonstrated that there was still so much undiscovered greatness below the surface–golden nuggets of musical goodness hiding under musty boxes in church attics, in the dusty cobwebbed corners of regional DJ booths, on the neglected underside of record store browsers.

Lenny Kaye gave hunters and gatherers a new mission. Some of the most desired and sought-after garage and psychedelic singles–local obscurities by artists that are known only to the most dedicated collectors–can fetch thousands of dollars today.

For the casual listener, Nuggets is an effective and affordable way to be inducted into the very wide and woolly world of garage rock. And upon its release, it provided easy access to, and education about, a genre of music that would prove remarkably influential for a new generation of underfed and under-budgeted artists (a generation that included Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith).

And The Horse They Rode In On

So why was this collection of fossils and relics so consequential upon its release? Perhaps it was because of how starkly Nuggets contrasted what rock music had become. It was 1972. Rock music was now entirely mainstream, and arguably, a bit domesticated. The album charts were dominated by artists like Chicago, Carole King, Elton John, and the Moody Blues.

In place of the previous era’s untethered experimentation and charming naivete were studio-polished, big-budget, major-labor platters with long run times and platinum ambitions. So when Lenny Kaye brought these old songs back from the dead, he also provided a valuable reminder of what it sounded like when rock bands were the underdogs.

Nuggets was no mere time capsule. It was a lesson that a coming generation would take to heart. Nuggets had an impact of biblical proportions on the artists who would soon be called punks.

In 1975, Patti Smith made her full-length debut with Lenny Kaye on guitar. Horses was a major milestone in recorded history, and the opening salvo for the blitzkrieg bop of the Punk Era.

And contained within Nuggets was a template for the DIY junk-shop ethos that connected performers as diverse as Smith, Blondie, Television, and the Ramones—heard below covering a song by the Seeds.

By 1977, New York’s CBGB was the center of the rock universe, and Kaye was at the heart of it all.

Nice Package

Nuggets also proved massively influential as an example of how to assemble and repackage music. Following the successful release of the original Nuggets compilation, Kaye envisioned a second volume of tunes. It would have looked something like this:

This volume was ultimately scrapped.

However, the Nuggets franchise gave way to a cottage industry of garage and psych compilations. Top-notch reissue label Rhino released 12 separate Nuggets compilations in the ‘80s.

A host of copycat collections were released in their midst, with Pebbles being the best among them.

Then in 1998, Rhino released an expanded 4-CD version of the original compilation that significantly widens the lens—adding big hits (“Incense and Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock) alongside more deep obscurities (“I Ain’t No Miracle Worker” by The Brogues).

And in 2001, Rhino issued a long-awaited sequel to Kaye’s first compilation. Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969 is actually just as exciting and revelatory as the original, demonstrating that the American phenomena captured in the first compilation were actually global in scale–that so many other countries had their own locally-flavored traditions of psychotropic indulgence and sonic experimentation.

Long-Distance Runaround

I admit, there’s a lot of music to absorb here so I’ll leave you to it. But since there are, like, 200+ songs included in this post, I’ll at least point you toward my favorite tune from Nuggets II (with the usual bit of tangled trivia).

The Syndicats were a British Beat band with an interesting claim to fame. Guitarist Steve Howe got his start with the Syndicats before joining a band called Tomorrow—also represented on Nuggets II.

Anyway, when Howe left the Syndicats in early ‘65, he was replaced by a guy named Ray Fenwick. The following year, Fenwick left to join a Dutch twee-pop band called The Tee Set, before ultimately ending the decade as a member of the Spencer Davis Group.

Meanwhile, the Syndicats replaced Ray Fenwick with a guitarist named Peter Banks. But after just two years, three guitarists, and three singles for Columbia Records, the Syndicats disbanded.

Peter Banks joined an entirely different group called The Syn (again, also on Nuggets II). The Syn included a bassist named Chris Squire.

When the Syn disbanded in 1969, Squire and Banks co-founded Yes. Banks played guitar on their first two albums, but disagreement over the musical direction of the band led to his dismissal. The remaining members of Yes hired fellow former Syndicat Steve Howe as his replacement, and they went on to sell 30 million records over the next decade together.

Got all that?

Anyway, that is all very much besides the point, because neither Howe nor Banks are the guitarist heard on this 1965 recording. Instead, you’ll hear Fenwick shredding on this straight-nasty and criminally under-heard slab of wax.