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Rhino
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The original 1972 Lenny Kaye–compiled Nuggets was a rock landmark — a double-album collection of mostly non-hit songs by mostly unsung American mid-’60s garage bands that somehow captured the boundless cultural energy of the time and helped spark a garage-band revival. In 1998, Rhino gave it a super-size reissue as a four-CD box set — Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 — and followed up in 2001 with a second, equally large Nuggets box dedicated to music by non-American artists — "the British Empire and beyond" — from the same three-year period. This year the label devoted a third four-disc monster to what it’s calling the "Second Psychedelic Era," which apparently (arbitrarily?) occurred between 1976 and 1996. Truth be told, only a small fraction of Children of Nuggets’ 100 tracks can be called psychedelic, but every one of them follows stylistic lines that connect it to the halcyon ’60s, from "I Can’t Hide" by San Francisco’s Flamin’ Groovies and "Help You Ann" by Boston’s own Lyres to "Lights Are Changing" by England’s Bevis Frond and "I Want You Back" by Australia’s Hoodoo Gurus. It’s not a perfect line-up — in particular, most of the ’80s LA "Paisley Underground" bands just haven’t held up. But any set featuring such wondrous, near-forgotten acts as Mickey & the Milkshakes, Sun Dial, and the Spongetones is at least worth the effort that went into compiling it.
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