Too Much To Dream
“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”― Harlan Ellison
Nuggets at 50. Patti Smith group guitarist Lenny Kaye was on stage this past Tuesday night at The Chapel in San Francisco telling the story of how Elektra head honcho Jac Holzman called him into his office, telling him of an acid vision for a project called Nuggets. He wanted Kaye to compile the best songs from the psychedelic era, an immediately accessible time-capsule of tracks that were too good to be lost with the death of the summer of love. Not even a decade had gone by since the music in question was initially released, but for some reason popular culture had already magic-carpeted enough away from paisleys (yes…“eys” and not “ies”) and peppermints that it seemed ripe for rediscovery.
The resultant compilation and it’s success started a series…a 60s reissue brand that launched other fantastic copy-cat compilation series like Pebbles and High In The Mid-Sixties, Acid Visions and (on the garage-rock side) Back From The Grave: all rescuing this amazing thing called psychedelic music from the forgottenness of Byzantium and giving enthusiasts like me a curated experience of some of the greatest music to come out of the acid age. I loved the Nuggets compilation. I loved getting turned-on to The Seeds, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Chocolate Watchband and The Electric Prunes. I loved the follow up…English Nuggets…saluting the lysergic laminations coming from across the ocean. It is safe to say that for me…and so many others…Nuggets was life-changing and the songs became a soundtrack for a film called…“Record Collecting.”
To honor the 50th Anniversary of the release of Nuggets, a massive vinyl reissue of the reissue was issued on record store day, coming with an expansive new track listing. Catching a wave of that release was the non-profit Wild Honey doing a fundraiser in Los Angeles featuring a night of Nuggets: a modern-wrecking-crew house band of heavies (REM’s Peter Buck, The Young Fresh Fellows’ Scott McCaughey), Lenny Kaye as conductor, and a cavalcade of singers, old and new, singing the songs of the 60s. I was not there, but can tell you from what I heard…even if only to witness James Lowe of The Electric Prunes singing the song that made his band famous—the song that opens-up the original Nuggets release—I Had Too Much Too Dream Last Night: I bet there was no better place to be on Earth, Saturn (Happy 99th Birthday +3 Marshall Allen), or any incensed-fueled black-lit listening room at the end of the Universe.
A few weeks ago, my dear friend Barry Simons (Go Giants!) got a call from Lenny asking if he could help throw together a Nuggets celebration in San Francisco. Concert promoters FolkYeah was holding a date at The Chapel. As Barry was putting together a band, Barry asked me if I would DJ. DJ a Nuggets gig? ALLLLLLRIGHT. The motor behind the band he created was Alec Palao. Alec is not only a musicologist extraordinaire, who over the past decade has continued the Nuggets brand with releases like Love is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets and Transparent Days: West Coast Nuggets (both excellent) but also found himself pushing the bass behind recreations of bands from the day like The Seeds and The Chocolate Watchband. He was the man for the job. With local legend Chris Von Sneidern on guitar (ex-Sneetches, like Palao, and ex-Flying Color), Al Chan (of The Rubinoos!), John Tinloy (Back Pages), Dave Seabury gallantly on drums, and The Muff’s Melanie Vammen on Keys—the band had a motor that was ready to electrify The Chapel.
The night was a surged-up steroided Karaoke event, with each singer coming on-stage to sing one of the legendary songs on Nuggets, and depending who was behind the mic determined how outer worldly the song would be represented. It was an all-star San Francisco line-up, many of whom I had known since…gulp…a teenager. Bob Reed (Overwhelming Colorfast) started the set off, killing The Chocolate Watchband’s Let’s Talk About Girls with his low, powersoul of a voice, and mop-topped budget rocker Russell Quan of the Mummies blasted through Dirty Water, keeping time hitting his head with his tambourine. There were a lot of highs in the Nuggets set: Harold Ray exorcising Hey Joe, channeling the late great Roy Loney with his command of the stage, Kelley Stoltz and original Syndicate Of Sound’s bass player grooving hard through Little Girl, Little Roger (of the Goosebumps, the band that was sued by Led Zeppelin when their parody Stairway To Gilligan’s Island actually charted) lounged up 96 Tears beautifully, The Avenger’s Penelope Houston blew the roof off with her version of Don’t Look Back while Lydia Walker, who I had not heard of until that night, bellowed and shook her way excellently through Liar Liar: a heart stopping performance.
The show ended with sheer power…Peter Case hitting the stage and delivering the final one-two punch with Lies into Baby Please Don’t Go which gave the ex-Plimsoul room to improvise and to shout it up like a Stax big finish. But for me, the best was last, when Jello Biafra was introduced as the encore presenter, blasting his way through Louie Louie, adding verse after verse as he free-styled, denouncing the body politic of San Francisco in a way that only he could pull off. That all-powerful iconic force-feeding voice of his still strikes as hot and potent as it did in the early days of The Dead Kennedys and his performance triumphed the subversive nature these songs embodied when they were first unleashed into squaresville. He had one song, he owned it, and glimpsed San Francisco a look into the roots of both the psych movement of the 60s and the punk movement of the 70s and 80s.
Yet the San Francisco night of Nuggets was more than a salute to the music of time gone by, it was a reminder of the great artists that are still in the Bay Area today, and the force they can recon when called to the stage together.
Nuggets was my gateway drug into the world of psychedelic music when I was introduced to it in the early 80s, almost two decades after the original recordings were released. Think about the foresight of Jac Holtzman when he tapped Lenny Kaye to do the initial compilation just over five years after the singles initially dropped. It is kind of crazy…definitely brilliant.
This week has headlined way too many deaths of culture movers, brilliant artists, insane storytellers. Tina Turner. Algy Ward. John Nova Lomax (my heart goes out to his father, John III). Many more. Kenneth Anger was as subversive and forward thinking as they come. His crazed film Scorpio Rising was enough to make him a legend, Lucifer Rising started his infamy and his book Hollywood Babylon aired the dirty laundry that tinsel town had hidden for years. He was a minor of the dark recesses of the human condition…and he was brilliant at it. Check out the above article on him as well as the killer from Aquarium Drunkard.
Performances & Recordings 1998-2018 by Charles Curtis
Charles Curtis is one of the most acclaimed experimental cellists in the world. His work on the Terry Jennings album that came out last year is just splendid as is this release of his various recordings over the years (including another Terry Jennings composition). With liner notes by the one and only Le Monte Young, and fantastic mastering by Stephen Mathieu this is an incredible fragile whisper of a record that takes you to quiet worlds and small, yet epic spaces.
Short Cuts: Rare photos show very young Bob Dylan in northern Minnesota
“One photo comes from Barry Tusin, who now lives in the Chicago area but grew up in Superior. Tusin writes that his aunt, Ruth Rovell, lived in Hibbing and was friends with Beatrice "Beatty" Zimmerman, Bobby's mother. Beatty occasionally dropped Bobby off to play with Barry's cousin, Jackie, and on this day, a neighbor friend.”
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: Weil, Gandhi, Cioran, and Mishima on humility.
“When it comes to failure of whatever stripe, can’t we just follow in the footsteps of the stoic Captain Call and ‘ride off from it’? The philosopher Costică Brădățan answers with an unequivocal no. Instead, he asks us to hold our horses and embrace failures of all kinds, from mere shortcomings to death. And in In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, he devotes his considerable powers of observation to the distinct potential of the acceptance of failure to liberate.”
Alta Serials: Part One: The Road to the Oregon Territory
Fantastic weekend reading: “The Applegate Trail extends more than 500 miles, from southern Oregon to Humboldt, Nevada, and connects the Oregon and California emigrant trails. It was a branch of the longest, most heavily traveled route of western migration in American history, and today has largely dropped from public consciousness. The story of how it was charted begins with three brothers who set out from St. Louis to the Oregon territory in 1843”.
The Traveller
by John Berryman
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'
They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'
They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.
I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the travellers,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practised on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.
**THIS NEWSLETTER IS DEDICATED TO JOHN NOVA LOMAX.
“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult.”
― Harlan Ellison