Barry Tashian was a Connecticut teenager visiting England in the summer of 1964 when his world was turned upside down. After seeing and hearing bands like the Rolling Stones for the first time, Tashian returned home in the fall to attend Boston University, his destiny now certain.
“The Stones and the Kinks were doing stuff by Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, this macho stuff which I felt deeply, and doing it in a way that I could instantly relate,” Tashian recalls. “I wanted to start a band that would be a tight rock ‘n’ roll band and play music that had some of that raw blues feeling. I said, `If we do that, people will love it.’ “
Tashian was right. Within months, students were lining up around the block to get into the Rathskeller, a dingy bar across the street from campus, to watch Tashian’s band, the Remains. By year’s end, the Remains had signed with Epic Records. The band members quit school and were invited on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after the impresario dropped in unexpectedly on one of their Greenwich Village bar gigs. In the summer of ’66, the Remains found themselves opening for The Beatles on an American tour.
Yet the Boston quartet never had a hit record, despite a string of explosive, blue-eyed soul singles, and by 1967 they had broken up.
“The only thing we couldn’t understand is why it wasn’t happening sooner for us,” Tashian says. “We thought people should hear us and love us. We didn’t understand it takes a long time to build up.”
Tashian’s story is not atypical. According to rock historian Greg Shaw, 63 percent of all American boys under the age of 20 were playing in a band in the mid-’60s–an exaggeration that conveys the spirit of the era. This first great wave of American rock ‘n’ roll bands was almost comically passionate; the unschooled musicians cranked their guitars so loud their records sounded defective and punctuated their lyrics with horror-movie screams.
Their names are etched in obscurity: Blues Magoos, the Woolies, the Elastik Band, Max Frost & the Troopers, Gonn, Clefs of Lavender Hill, the Lollipop Shoppe. Yet the style of raw guitar-bass-drums music they made, and the attitude behind it, remains a cornerstone of rock ‘n’ roll. “Nuggets,” a four-CD box set out this week, is a 118-song celebration of that legacy.
The Rhino box set expands the original “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968,” a now-legendary double album of one-hit wonders and obscurities compiled in 1972 by Lenny Kaye, a rock writer, part-time talent scout and former garage band guitarist who would go on to play with Patti Smith. “Nuggets” regularly appeared on critics’ lists of the greatest rock albums of all time, and planted the seeds for the arrival of punk in the late ’70s, indie-rock in the ’80s and alternative in the ’90s.
Though the new box greatly enhances Kaye’s original 27-song collection with many more songs and extensive liner notes, it does not improve on it. Kaye focused on relative unknowns who, for one three-minute period, sounded like the best rock ‘n’ roll bands in the world. For many listeners, “Nuggets” was their first exposure to such brilliant bands as Texas psych-freak commandos The Thirteenth Floor Elevators; the Todd Rundgren-led Philadelphia soul-popsters the Nazz; and the Seeds, inspired Hollywood amateurs fronted by mercurial vocalist Sky Saxon.
Kaye saw these bands not as scattered, unrelated points on a musical map but as long-distance soul mates caught in an upheaval, a changing of the guard in rock ‘n’ roll at a time when ambitious teens with guitars were free for the first time to experiment with guitar feedback, weird sound effects, drugs, and lyrics that addressed their sexual frustration and social alienation with an explicitness that couldn’t have been imagined five years before.
“It was a period when rock was emerging out of the AM-radio singles format into the FM rock-is-art concept, a fundamental shift in how the music was regarded,” says Kaye. “It was shifting from teenage music into something adults would make. By 1972, that more adult perspective had fully taken over with things like progressive rock and classical influences creeping into the music. So from that perspective a lot of these forgotten bands — and the short, sharp energy shock of their singles — sounded pretty good, a kind of reminder that in making the transition to a more sophisticated-sounding music, something of rock’s essential spirit had been lost.”
The music that roared from the garages seethed with desperation, if not musical ability, as if each band knew it had three minutes or less to make its mark on history and could afford to hold nothing back. There was an unfettered sense of freedom in the vocals and the lyrics, which addressed everything from drug-induced paranoia (“Voices green and purple/They’ll get you somehow,” shrieked the Bees) to revenge fantasies (“Little girl, it’s all over for you,” sneered the Syndicate of Sound’s Don Baskin with a chilling laugh).
The Standells hit it big with “Dirty Water,” in large part because lead singer Dick Dodd sounded twice as tough as he looked — a 19-year-old show-biz vet who had been among the original Mousketeers and who had played drums for Jackie DeShannon. “Dirty Water,” which went to No. 11 on the pop charts in 1965, was written by producer Ed Cobb but was defined in the studio by the Los Angeles band’s performance: The buzz-saw guitar riff was the invention of guitarist Tony Valentino, and the vocals were largely ad-libbed by the cocksure Dodd: “I’m gonna tell ya a big, fat story, baabeeee, all about my town,” he roared.
When the Standells eventually played Boston they opened for the Stones. “When you’re playing with the Stones and people are yelling for your song, you know you’ve got a hit record,” says Dodd, who backs up the Righteous Brothers on the oldies circuit these days. “We had arrogance and cockiness. We were young. They called us punks. I guess we were. But it wasn’t an act. It was the way we felt.”
Such warped originality was tempered by slavish imitation, particularly of the more successful British Invasion bands that inspired many of the Americans to pick up guitars in the first place. The Gants copied The Beatles’ “In My Life” on “I Wonder,” the Brogues ripped off the Animals’ organ-drenched soul on “I Ain’t No Miracle Worker,” and the manic guitar raveups of the early Yardbirds resurfaced on the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.”
Yet the American garage bands of the mid-’60s have not only endured, they are now recognized as pioneers. They were punk rock before being punk rock was cool. They embodied a reckless, push-it-to-the-limit attitude that has become the cornerstone of great rock through subsequent generations, from the Ramones and Sex Pistols to the Replacements and Nirvana.
And the legacy of the “Nuggets” bands, though largely written out of most rock history books, endures in fascinating, inspiring ways. In organizing a recent reunion show by the Remains for Spain, Tashian was startled to hear from a promoter that there are 70 bands alone in that country who regularly cover the Remains’ songs, even though none of those numbers charted in America.
“I guess we accomplished a lot for four kids in our early 20s,” says Tashian, who now makes his living as a country singer and producer in Nashville. “We had a lot of stuff inside about growing up and girlfriends who did us wrong that we had to get out. It was a release and it was an adventure, our way of making a statement. In a way, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll was and still is. Only difference is, back then we were working with a clean slate. Since then so many bands have come along working with the same basic instruments — guitars, bass and drums — that it’s taken a bit of the mystery out of it. But back then, anything seemed possible.”
FOR A TIME, IT WAS GLORIOUS
The “Nuggets” collection includes the sole hit by Chicago’s leading garage rockers, the Shadows of Night: a cover of Them’s “Gloria,” written by Van Morrison.
“Our drummer, Tom Schiffour, had a pen pal in the U.K., and Tom would send him blues records from Chicago in exchange for music by what were then obscure British bands like The Who,” says Jerry McGeorge, the Shadows guitarist. He now works at a car dealership in New Jersey. “That’s how we heard `Gloria’ — we were playing it in early ’65 long before Them got any air play over here with it.”
In their heyday, the Shadows ruled suburban rock havens such as the Cellar in Arlington Heights.
“It was a great little scene because kids could come to shows with their long hair and jeans and not get hassled,” McGeorge said. “We could play original tunes, which you couldn’t do at the more adult bars downtown, and people would love it.”
On the road, the band members were banned from Holiday Inns because of their penchant for hurling firecrackers and chairs out of windows. “We were playing 200 shows a year, sometimes two a night, and we had an attitude,” McGeorge says with a laugh. “We showed up two hours late for this show at a bar in east Cleveland and the crowd was seriously pissed off. So (lead singer) Jim Sohns turns to me and says, `How loud can you play?’ We just turned up our amps and played everybody under the tables. Then Sohns says, `If you be nice to us, we’ll turn it down.’ “
It was too much too soon. Despite the success of “Gloria,” the Shadows never had another hit and fell apart in 1967.
