1. Various ArtistsNuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era
Nuggets! Yes! Fantastic fuckin’ record. Nuggets was the first album released that collected all these one-hit wonders from that really, really short psychedelic era of about 1966 to 1970 on American radio. It just completely kicked my ass when I first heard it. It was this music that I never knew existed! They say it was on the radio, but I didn’t hear it. It represents a time in pop music when the subject matter switched from boy-meets-girl to like boy-meets-God/gods! It’s insane when you think about it, you know, we’re singing about LSD, we’re singing about "opening my miiiind", I just couldn’t imagine kids doing that today. That’s so irresponsible and cool, you know? Like, I’m going to find something else beyond reality through some bizarre drug? I mean, it’s so fucking punk rock when you think about it!
Electric Prunes! ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’… I mean, listen to that! Listen to what he’s saying! I couldn’t imagine that on any radio station now. "I had too much to dream"! Just the act of dreaming, of going outside of your consciousness, is the reason for a two-minute pop song. That is so fuckin’ cool. And the sound of it, the vibrato, the reverb… out of control! Kind of like a cheesy mystical, we’re-doing-the-best-we-can-with-as-little-money-as-we-have thing. They can’t make a blockbuster film, but they can try to freak you out in two-and-a-half minutes. It’s genius.
Anyway, that record was the first of many records to group together all these songs from that time period, and it just completely freaked me out when I was a kid. I found it in one of the record stores I used to prowl and I just read the cover and thought "What is this? ‘From the first psychedelic era’? What?". I thought I knew what psychedelic music was: Iron Butterfly, right?! But I just gave it a try. A lot of the records in this list, I just gave it a try because I liked the cover.
