Various Artists: Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 19641969
Once in a while, a movement comes along to fulfill the original democratic promise of rock 'n' roll, a style simple enough to be performed cheaply and well by anyone with a modest budget and a healthy reserve of enthusiasm. Between rockabilly, punk, and hip-hop, there was the garage-rock explosion of the mid-'60s, in which countless acts—inspired by R&B, the British Invasion, and the first wave of LSD distribution—found expression through distorted guitars, concise pop songs, and a handful of psychedelic notions about tripping out, falling in love, and changing the world. Expanding Lenny Kaye's genre-defining Nuggets collection from 1972, the 1998 Nuggets box set offered an overview of American garage rock, from "Louie, Louie" and "Wooly Bully" through "Journey To The Center Of The Mind" and "Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)." Its welcome sequel, Nuggets II, broadens its scope to include the whole world, with a special emphasis on the U.K. garage scene. There are key differences. Much more heavily inspired by The Who and the Mod scene than their U.S. counterparts, the garage bands of Nuggets II often have a sharper, angrier edge. The Seeds may have accused its unspecified target of "Pushin' Too Hard," but the band's members probably wouldn't have thought to blame society as a whole for their youthful anger, as The Bluestars do on "Social End Product." Nuggets II also displays a more pronounced fondness for studio-enhanced weirdness than the U.S. set. The progressive-rock future of many of its bands provides one explanation, but here the weirdness works. In general, Nuggets II captures psychedelia at just the right point, before experimentation gave way to self-indulgence. The set's packaging and liner notes boast of its "hitless" status, which isn't quite true; a few hits are scattered here and there. But only collectors and those who lived through the era are likely to have come across many of Nuggets II's obscurities. Of course, discovering them is the fun of these collections, but there's something inspiring about the universality of psychedelia's first age, when Japan's The Mops, Brazil's Os Mutantes, and Iceland's Thor's Hammer created a common language out of a few chords and some discontent. As much as The Beatles and the Stones, countless forgotten bands like Timebox, The Open Mind, The Craig, and The (Australian) Playboys helped define the epoch-shifting decade of the '60s. Their movement may not have lasted long, but the record it left provides one of the strongest reminders that rock 'n' roll could, has, and will change the world.