The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: The Monkees

I’d certainly heard music from the ‘60s before discovering The Monkees during their massive 20-year-anniversary revival in 1986, which saw their TV series snare a new generation on MTV, all of their original albums reenter the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and three of the original members mount a hugely successful tour. But, as much as Dylan and Beatles songs appealed to me, it was still my dad’s music. Seeing my grammar school peers dig The Monkees made them OK for me too dig, too, and their jangly guitars, irresistible pop hooks, and sweet harmonies were a welcome antidote to the shit purveying the contemporary pop scene. I was too young for college radio, so my love of R.E.M., Throwing Muses, Elvis Costello, and other great mid-‘80s acts that didn’t receive the air-time that Lionel Richie, Mr. Mister, and Peter Cetera did was still years away. The organic, guitar-based pop of The Monkees appealed to my twelve-year-old self far more than the glossy synthesized garbage that then littered top-forty radio and MTV.

As they were for twelve year-olds in the mid-‘60s, The Monkees served as a gateway to my interest in more sophisticated Rock bands during the mid-‘80s. They also sparked my obsession with '60s pop: The Monkees begat The Beatles, who begat The Rolling Stones, who begat The Who, who begat The Pretty Things, and so on, and so on. I did go through a phase in which I scoffed at The Monkees when I grew a bit older, but after rediscovering them a few years after the Listen to the Band box set appeared in 1990, I found that many of my favorite hooks were right where I left them. I was shocked by how well much of The Monkees’ music held up, even as I now recognized what critics had been hating about them for almost thirty years.

And here lies The Monkees problem. Their best music is often their least known. Their best known songs threaten to confirm the major criticisms lobbed at the group: (1) they were put together by cynical TV-producers bent on cashing in on the success of A Hard Day’s Night, a film starring a group that came together organically to make the decade’s greatest music, (2) they didn’t play their instruments (“Last Train to Clarksville”, “I’m a Believer”), and (3) they played lightweight, saccharine bubblegum sung with a mere trace of competence (“A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You”, “Daydream Believer”).

The first of these complaints is the easiest to dismiss: the same thing could be said about The Sex Pistols, and no one questions their credibility just because they were assembled by Malcolm McLaren. The “Monkees don’t play they own instruments and therefore are completely illegitimate” gripe has always been a hollow one, too. The Beach Boys, one of pop’s most respected bands, rarely played the instruments on their records. Not a Beach Boy touched an instrument during the SMiLE sessions. Groups less monumental than The Beach Boys, but still more respected than The Monkees, used studio players at times, as well: The Byrds and Love being two (I’d never lump in, say, The Mamas and the Papas, with these groups as others do, because no one should expect a vocal group to play the instruments on their recordings). And as anyone with the slightest knowledge of pop history knows, The Monkees successfully fought for the right to play on their records after existing for little over six months. That is quite a feat, but one that never won them an iota of respect from the hip music press.

The final complaint is perhaps more legitimate, but one that can be traced to a single individual: Davy Jones. Davy’s little-boy good looks obviously won the group a gargantuan following of pre-teen girls, but his equally prepubescent voice did the music no favors. Much of his material is fluff, and that includes big hits like “Daydream Believer” and “A Little Bit Me”. Davy’s cloying numbers mar the best Monkees records. The fact that his material is better known by non-fanatics than Mike Nesmith’s sophisticated contributions has done immeasurable damage to The Monkees’ reputation.



Not surprisingly, when Rhino Records chose a Monkees track to include on Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 (2009) they went for a Nesmith composition. “Daily Nightly” was a good selection not just because of its quality, but because of its relevance to the box set’s theme (it is a surreal yet oddly journalistic report on the Sunset Strip curfew riots between hippies and cops in the summer of ’66). The track also helps counter The Monkees’ bubblegum image with its razor sharp bass lick, psychedelic poeticism, and genuinely cutting-edge squalls of Moog synthesizer (another well-traveled nugget of Monkees-lore is that Micky Dolenz was only the third person to own one of these futuristic instruments, the first being Paul Beaver and the second being, strangely enough, country legend Buck Owens).

“Daily Nightly” is nestled in the album most likely to entice non-believers into a serious Monkees habit. The Monkees (number one on Billboard for 13 weeks) and More of the Monkees (number one on Billboard for an astounding 18 weeks) may have sold more copies, and Headquarters may be the only album on which The Monkees serve as their own backing band on every track, but Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. (1967) is the most consistently fine Monkees album.



As much as Peter Tork— the Monkee who most craved legitimacy— wanted the group to continue working together as they had on Headquarters, their intense schedule (which included media appearances, TV filming, and live performances, as well as recording sessions) and diverging interests made it impossible. As a result, Tork rates Pisces below Headquarters, but The Monkees’ fourth record offers a more confident selection of compositions and performances. And, in all fairness, The Monkees are still the backing band for the most part here. Chip Douglas, the former Turtle who played bass on Headquarters and produced that album and Pisces, was essentially a fifth Monkee spared having to appear on the hit-and-miss TV show. His consistently excellent bass playing can be heard on Pisces, as well. Micky Dolenz, who basically learned to play the drums while making Headquarters, sits out most of Pisces (he only contributes the fairly simple beat on “Cuddly Toy”). Instead, The Monkees used ace session man “Fast” Eddie Hoe, whose playing made the sessions run smoother and delivered monumental performances on tracks such as “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Salesman” that could never be matched by Dolenz’s rudimentary chops. Otherwise, that’s still Nesmith playing guitar throughout the record and Tork playing keyboards and even Jones whacking his tambourine. This mixed approach suited The Monkees best, but the real strength of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones Ltd. comes from its great songs and the ever-increasing presence of Mike Nesmith.

No other Monkees record contains as many lead vocals by the very adult-sounding Nesmith as Pisces does. Oddly, most of his vocals are on songs written by others, but the songs he chose to sing are all top-notch: the funky Tex-Mex twanging “Salesman”, a put-down of drug pushers written by Nes’s buddy Craig Smith from The Penny Arcade, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s spectacular “Love Is Only Sleeping”, on which Nesmith plays an infectiously wiry guitar riff and hits his eeriest falsetto, Lewis and Clarke’s Byrds-like “What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round?”, which is among The Monkees’ most beloved album tracks, and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin’s transcendentally beautiful folk-rocker “The Door Into Summer”, my vote for the group’s greatest creation.

Nesmith also sings his own “Don’t Call On Me”, a lounge-lizard experiment that manages to be both genuinely pretty and ironically amusing (his breathy sigh before the velveteen organ solo is hilarious). He handed “Daily Nightly” to Dolenz, who also played the avant garde Moog part, which starkly contrasts the more musical lines played by Paul Beaver on Goffin and King’s “Star Collector”. That particular track contains one of Davy Jones’s more bearable vocals, possibly because he mostly shouts it (no vomit-inducing whispers of “I love you” here) and possibly because the fabulously chaotic backing track still threatens to overwhelm him. Jones also does a fairly respectable job on the Tom Jones-like rocker “She Hangs Out”, a superior remake of a song that briefly appeared on the B-side of “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You”. His other two performances are a bit harder to stomach: “Hard to Believe”, a smarmy bossa nova he co-wrote (and tellingly, the only Pisces track on which the other Monkees do not play), and Harry Nilsson’s sleazy combo of bubblegum melody and porno lyricism, “Cuddy Toy”. Despite recalling “a Hell’s Angels’ gang-bang” while trumpeting Jones’ sticky sweetness, “Cuddly Toy” became a sort of minor Monkees classic.

Micky Dolenz, who so dominated The Monkees’ first three records, makes less of an impression here, but each of his contributions are major. Aside from “Daily Nightly” he takes co-lead on the two tracks that made up the group’s best double-sided hit: Gerry Goffin and Carol King’s “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, one of the few Monkees tracks on which all members of the band make upfront vocal contributions, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby’s Hart’s spooky “Words”, which features a tasty call-and-response between Dolenz and Tork.

So, if you’re quick on the draw when it comes time to skip “Cuddly Toy” and “Hard to Believe”, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, LTD. is the album most likely to convert you into a Monkees fan. The next step would be Headquarters (1967). Not as consistently rich as Pisces, HQ houses the pleasure of hearing a damn good garage band coming to life. Nesmith’s “You Told Me” and “Sunny Girlfriend” and the Little Richard-inspired band composition “No Time” rock hard and mean. The sweet and sour “Shades of Gray” and Boyce and Hart’s Simon & Garfunkle-esque “Mr. Webster” offer moments of true gravity off-set by the “we realize we’re just winging this” goofs of “No Time”, “Band 6”, and the weird a cappella experiment “Zilch”. Micky Dolenz’s “Randy Scouse Git” works as both comedy and a thrillingly inventive track. It’s the best thing he’s ever written and among the best Monkees recordings. Headquarters really only has one bad cut, the Jones-sung "I Can't Get Her Off My Mind", but it is considerably worse than anything on Pisces.



Bold listeners should then check out Head, the avant garde soundtrack to The Monkees’ avant grade 1968 cult film. The album contains the highest percentage of excellent Monkee songs, but the fact that there are only six of them on the record makes it less of an easy listen than Pisces and Headquarters. Aside from Nesmith’s ferocious “Circle Sky” (as far as I’m concerned, this studio version pulverizes the more lauded live one from the film), Tork’s exotic “Can You Dig It?” and exhilarating “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?”, the gorgeous ballad “As We Go Along” (with guitar by Neil Young), the monumental psychedelic excursion “Porpoise Song”, and “Daddy’s Song”, a better Nilsson/Jones confluence than “Cuddly Toy”, the record is filled out with bizarro montages of sound effects and dialogue from the Head film edited with cheeky mischievousness by co-screenwriter Jack Nicholson.

The Monkees' two biggest sellers lack the adventure of their albums that followed, but both The Monkees (1966) and More of the Monkees (1967) still have much to recommend them. No one but those addicted to TV theme songs needs to listen to “(Theme from) The Monkees”, and Davy commits two of his worst crimes with “I Wanna Be Free” on the first album and “The Day We Fall In Love” on the second, but Nesmith’s pioneering country-rock work-outs “Papa Gene’s Blues”, “The Kind of Girl I Could Love”, and especially “Sweet Young Thing” are great. So are the more garagey numbers, such as “Saturday’s Child”, “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day”, “Let’s Dance On”, “She”, “Mary Mary”, and “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”. Davy even manages to get off one terrific bubblegummer with his rendition of Neil Diamond’s “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)” on More.

The remainder of The Monkees’ catalogue is sketchier. Each album contains a handful of tracks essential for true-believers, but the less committed should stop with the first four records and Head. The Birds, The Bees, & The Monkees (1968) is the best of the remainder, but it’s a hodgepodge with Nesmith’s freakiest experiments rubbing elbows with Jones’s fluffiest bubblegum. Still, you wouldn’t want to be without “Tapioca Tundra” or “Auntie’s Municipal Court”, Nesmith’s two greatest fusions of country and psych. The Monkees Present (1969) is more consistent, with Jones finally hitting on a more adult approach to his brand of pop and Dolenz discovering light jazz-pop, but the material is less exciting. Instant Replay (1969) is an unfortunately assembled outtakes compilation. The Monkees had a slew of great stuff in the can, so there’s no excuse for the inclusion of “Me Without You”, “Just a Game”, and “Don’t Listen to Linda” aside from attempting to confirm The Monkees’ reputation as pap for teenyboppers. Dolenz’s suite “Shorty Blackwell” may have been an attempt to cast the group as heavyweight freaks, but it isn’t particularly listenable. But “I Wont’ Be the Same Without Her”, a leftover from The Monkees’ earliest sessions, is gorgeous, and the lacerating “You and I”, which features a more prominent Neil Young lead than “As We Go Along”, is hands down Jones’s best song and vocal. Changes (1970), The Monkees’ last gasp after Nesmith finally quit the group (Tork departed after Head), is the worst of the bunch, but even this thin platter contains one great rocker, the Jones-sung “99 Pounds”, and one last superb Dolenz raver, “Midnight Train”. Anything released as “The Monkees” after this shouldn’t even be touched with a twenty-foot, poo-covered cattle prod.

August 19, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: The Turtles

The Turtles are probably the most high-profile group included on the first Nuggets box set. Of course, they aren’t represented by any of their ubiquitous mega-hits like “Happy Together” or “Elenore”, both of which would be undeniably out of place amongst the punky garage rock on Nuggets. Their rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Outside Chance” fits in splendidly, though. It’s a short, sharp blast of driving, riffy Rock & Roll and a neat indicator of how diverse the Turtles could be. They are primarily known as purveyors of schlocky pop like the two hits mentioned above, but during their brief record-making career (1965-1969) they recorded five eclectic albums, each one worth owning. But where to start? Where to start? Relax… answering this question is the point of the Nuggets Record Buying Guide.



The obvious launching point may seem to be Happy Together/She’d Rather Me with Me (1967). It boasts the Turtles’ two biggest hits (as indicated by its painfully unimaginative title) and a couple of popular misses (the slow-burning “Me About You”; “Guide for the Married Man”, the title song from a Walter Matthau vehicle). Happy Together is not the Turtles’ strongest album, though. Some of the cuts are fairly non-descript, and the idiotically sung “Rugs of Wood and Flowers” is unlistenable. Even a couple of the more well-known cuts aren’t must-haves: “Happy Together” has been murdered by over-exposure and “Guide for the Married Man” sounds as disposable as most pop movie themes were in the mid-‘60s. You don’t want to be without “Me About You”, “She’d Rather Be With Me”, and some of the stronger album cuts (particularly “The Walking Song” and “Too Young to Be One”), but this record should be placed on the back burner for a bit. Same goes for The Turtles Present the Battles of the Bands (1968), which also contains a pair of huge hits (“Elenore” and “You Showed Me”), but there are too many goofy comedy tracks flanking them (the album’s conceit finds the band impersonating various groups in various genres, Sgt. Pepper-style). Again, there are some great songs here (“You Showed Me” is one of the Turtles’ best hit singles), but it’s pretty spotty overall.



The real launching point for a Turtles-habit is their final album. Turtle Soup (1969) does not include a single hit, but considering that plenty of listeners never took the Turtles’ hits very seriously, this is not a hindrance. The Turtles were so enamored with The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) that they nabbed Ray Davies to produce Turtle Soup, and the album shares the spare-but-intricate instrumentation that helped make VGPS an album that can be listened to over and over without being heard the same way twice. Also like Village Green, Turtle Soup covers a number of musical styles but remains unified by its production. There’s some ecstatic jangle-pop (“She Always Leaves Me Laughing”), Lovin’ Spoonful-style good timin’ (the May/December love song “Bachelor Mother”), delirious Rock & Roll ( “Hot Little Hands”), baroque pop (the beautiful “John and Julie”), a country-fried waltz (“Dance This Dance”), spooky mysterioso psych (“Somewhere Friday Night”), a Wagnerian pocket symphony (“Love in the City”), and a fabulous variation on the quiet-LOUD-quiet recipe that made a hit of “Happy Together” (“You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain”). Perhaps out of respect for their guest producer, the band turned in their most serious roster of tunes. There isn’t a “Rugs of Wood and Flowers” in the bunch, and after the hit-and-miss comedy of The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, this more serious direction is welcome. There are still moments of humor on Turtle Soup (most notably the sex-crazed “Hot Little Hands”), but there aren’t any of the silly pastiches or jokey performances that made some of their previous records lopsided. Impressively, Turtle Soup is also the Turtles’ only album to not contain a single song written by an outside composer, and each member of the group contributes both compositions and lead vocals.
Next, you might want to check out the Turtles second album, another lazily titled platter called You Baby/Let Me Be (1966). It’s a transitional record, finding the Turtles with one foot in the Byrdsy folk-rock of their debut (It Ain’t Me Babe [1965]) and one in the bubble gum of future hits like “She’d Rather Be with Me”. Both styles are evidenced in the two hits for which the album was named, but the record also has some gutsy garage rock (“Flyin’ High”; “Pall Bearing Ball Bearing World”) and blues (“House of Pain”), and a funny rumba (“Suburbia”). It Ain’t Me Babe is almost as good. The Turtles’ cover of “Like a Rolling Stone” is unnecessary (especially in light of the two superior Dylan covers with which it shares vinyl space), but their versions of P.F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction”, “Your Maw Said You Cried” (later covered by Robert Plant), and “Glitter and Gold” (covered by the amazing Canadian group Sloan in the ‘90s) are essential.

January 11, 2010: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: Love

With the exception of Hawthorne natives The Beach Boys, Love was the greatest group ever to sprout in Los Angeles. Before shouting “What about The Byrds?”, who surely had more international influence (unlike Love, The Byrds did not refuse to tour outside their hometown) and released more great albums, I’d like to point out that Love had their share of far-ranging influence (particularly on The Rolling Stones) and released three albums that stand as a greater LP-run than any triad of Byrds albums. The Byrds vs. Love issue is of particular relevance considering what a profound influence The Byrds had on Love’s debut album, which is rich in jangly twelve-string folk rock and features a song that cops the oft-copied “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” riff. But whereas The Byrds’ sound evolved gradually— only changing radically on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, their marvelous 1968 exploration of bluegrass and C&W— each of Love’s greatest albums was a jagged departure from their previous record, and each one took both their personal style and Rock & Roll as a whole in a completely new and electrifying direction.

Even Love novices know that the reputation of their album, Forever Changes, looms over everything else the band did previously and subsequently. Forever Changes is, indeed, Love’s masterpiece, a sumptuous, poetic, and straight-up weird monument of folk-rock and light-psychedelia; a must-listen cult classic that can sit proudly alongside The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle and The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. But is it the best place to form a Love habit?



On Rhino’s recently released Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, Love are represented by “You Set the Scene”, the winding, mysterious epic that served as the climax of Forever Changes. Yet they also make an appearance earlier in the set with “You I’ll Be Following”, a raw power-pop number from their eponymous debut album. Eleven years earlier, Rhino tossed Love’s most well-known song, the jittery, acid-rush “7 and 7 Is”, into the stew of its first Nuggets box. These three tracks from three different albums sound as though they were recorded by three different bands, and each is a fine representative of the album from which it was picked. Certainly the most demanding of these is “You Set the Scene”, and it accurately indicates Forever Changes’ lack of immediacy.

Forever Changes was the first Love album I heard, and with that first listen, I wasn’t quite sure what the hype was about. It seemed to be a pleasant enough collection of acoustic folk. Lead-Lover Arthur Lee and cohort Bryan Maclean had pleasant enough voices. The string arrangement were certainly nice, but the record didn’t exactly knock my stockings off. It was only with multiple listens that the brilliance of Forever Changes—it’s intricate structures, hauntingly bizarre and morbid lyrics (Lee convinced himself he only had a short time to live, and his obsession with his erroneously eminent demise drives his strange lyricism), and utter uniqueness—fully emerged for me. As a result of the long gestation of Forever Changes, I did not snatch my next Love record for several years. Had I begun with either Love or Da Capo I might have wholeheartedly fell in Love a lot sooner. Both albums are immediately appealing in ways that Forever Changes is not, yet both have their own unique sound—and their own unique flaws that may affect which one will be your best doorway into this essential group.


Love (1966), the band’s catchiest, simplest, poppiest record, suffers slightly from derivativeness. Da Capo and Forever Changes sound quite unlike anything else that preceded them. Love sounds a whole lot like The Byrds and The Rolling Stones. On “Can’t Explain”, Lee nicks the main riff from The Byrds’ “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and much of the lyric, rhyme-scheme, and melody of The Stones’ early LP-cut “What a Shame”. Now, as far as heavily derivative albums go, Love is one of the greatest. Each of its 14 tracks is bracing and infectious, and the moments of quiet, insightful, acoustic folk keep the proceedings from sounding excessively samey. And if you’re a Byrds or early-Stones fanatic, you’ll find much to love about Love.

Da Capo, however, sounds like no other band on this or any other planet. Its fusion of baroque complexity, amphetamine tempos, lysergic noise, jazzy experimentation, and vivid lyricism makes it one of the hardest rocking pure-psychedelic albums of psychedelia’s zenith year of 1967. The Stones were certainly dazzled enough to return Love’s petty thievery by stealing elements from “She Comes in Colors” for their own “She’s a Rainbow”.

Lee also contended that The Stones ripped off his band with “Goin’ Home”, the centerpiece of their 1966 LP Aftermath. “Goin’ Home” is a lengthy, bluesy improv that bears a resemblance to Love’s “Revelation” that could hardly be coincidental. Lee said that Jagger and his cronies saw Love perform the marathon-length “Revelation” live in ’66 before The Stones cut the allegedly derivative “Goin’ Home”, but his timeline doesn’t jibe: The Stones recorded their number in late ’65. Regardless of who is the true author of “Revelations”/“Goin’ Home”, neither is a high point of either band’s respective career, and “Revelations” is the one major flaw of Da Capo. On the flip of what is probably the most superb side of music on any Love album is the side-long, 17-minute, excruciatingly dull “Revelations”. Had Lee and company been able to put together another six songs as revelatory as the ones on Side A of Da Capo for its second side, the album surely would have been the band’s masterpiece. Still, that first side remains more instantly gratifying than Forever Changes, so I’m going to recommend getting your Love-affair started with Da Capo.


Following the release of Forever Changes, Arthur Lee disbanded the original Love line-up and put together a group of less individual musicians, most significantly losing Bryan Maclean, who wrote some of Love’s most enduring songs, including the gorgeous “Softly to Me” on their first album, “Orange Skies” from Da Capo, and “Alone Again, Or”, the most well-known track on Forever Changes. Historians and critics tend to dismiss the second coming of Love outright, and although the group lost some of its delightful quirkiness in favor of a less imaginative acid-rock path, I recommend you also check out Four Sail, the group’s first record from their second incarnation. Four Sail may not be as consistently dazzling as Love’s first two-and-a-half albums, but “Robert Montgomery”, “Your Friend and Mine – Neil’s Song”, “Nothing”, and several other tracks still show off Lee's mastery of tangy chord structures and outclass much of what his contemporaries were doing in 1969. Definitely deserving of a listen.

November 9, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: The Pretty Things

There were a lot of ‘60s bands that huddled in the massive shadow cast by the likes of The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who that were easily in the same league as those groups. There was The Left Banke from New York City and The Move from Birmingham and Procol Harum from London and Love from Los Angeles. But the group that most deserved to be placed in the upper echelon of ‘60s Rock royalty may have been The Pretty Things.

I can go on about the ground they smashed: that they were the first band to release a full-length Rock Opera, that they were the first band to sport truly long hair as opposed to mere collar-length mop tops, that drummer Viv Prince was the first genuine wild man of British Rock, that guitarist Dick Taylor helped birth The Rolling Stones. Those milestones are all worthy of mention, but what really makes the case for The Pretty Things’ greatness and importance is their music. The Pretties dished out R&B as tough as the early Stones, psychedelia as wild as Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, harmonies as rich and gorgeous as The Beatles or The Beach Boys, concepts as inventive and furiously delivered as The Who. Yet—unlike the bands I mentioned at the top of this paragraph—The Pretty Things never made much of an impression locally or abroad. The Left Banke and Procol Harum each had significant international hits. Love and The Move were both big bands on their home turf. The closest The Pretty Things came to making a commercial splash was managing a #10 UK hit in 1964 with “Don’t Bring Me Down”. They seemed to make the biggest impact on their peers. Surely, The Who’s Tommy would have sounded quite a bit different had it not been for The Pretties’ S.F. Sorrow. David Bowie was so fond of them that he covered two of their classics for his 1973 covers album Pin Ups. Led Zeppelin were big enough fans to sign The Pretty Things to their Swan Song Records.

When Rhino Records released Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-1969 in 2001, The Pretty Things were represented by a substantial three tracks: “Rosalyn”, “Midnight to Six Man” and “Walking Through My Dreams”. This triad is a powerful reminder of what a fine singles band they were, but their long players were equally important. Every L.P. they released between 1965 and 1970 is great, and you certainly couldn’t go wrong starting your Pretty Things collection with any one of them. But one clearly stands above the rest. During previous entries of The Nuggets Record Buying Guide about The Turtles, The Small Faces, and The Move, I selected albums that weren’t necessarily considered to be each band’s definitive release as the best one to hear first. In the case of The Pretty Things, their most celebrated album is the spot to start. Of course, I’m talking about S.F. Sorrow.

S.F. Sorrow (1968)



Yes, it’s neat that S.F. Sorrow was the first rock opera, but without a line-up of ace songs, the record would be nothing more than a historical footnote. Much like Tommy, the plot here is a bit obscure and hazily sketched, tracking the development of a troubled fellow from birth to disillusioned maturation. Unlike Tommy, there is no filler included solely for the purpose of storytelling… well, aside from the ambient track “Well of Destiny”, which is basically 1:47 of weird sound effects. Aside from that brief interlude, every single song on S.F. Sorrow is a stunner, each one bounding into fresh and freaky territory. The two pieces that bookend the album are the most straight-forward: the title track is a folk-rock gem that surfs along on a wave of lush acoustic guitars, sumptuous harmonies, and an incessant beat; the finale, “Loneliest Person”, is a brief, melancholic acoustic number that ends the record on a heart-wrenchingly elliptical note. Everything in between is a carnival of trippy experimentation and impeccable pop songwriting craft. The variety of moods and colors conjured throughout the record is incredible. “Bracelets of Fingers” is swirling, dizzying, intoxicating. “She Says Good Morning” is nightmarish yet beautiful. “Private Sorrow” intense, “Death” punishingly somber, “Baron Saturday” devilishly joyous, “Trust” ethereal and transcendent. “Old Man Going” is as tough an acoustic guitar-driven song as any Pete Townshend ever conceived, and it was clearly an influence on “Pinball Wizard” despite his assertions that Sorrow did not sway Tommy.

Lyrically, the record is more about creating impressions of events rather than establishing specific scenes with characters and dialogue, so it’s actually a lot more similar to Quadrophenia than Tommy in that department. In any event, the lyrics on Sorrow—based on a short story by singer Phil May (who turns 65 today)—are poetic in a way that neither the cartoonish Tommy nor the diary-like Quadrophenia are. Take “Balloon Burning”, a song about the death of Sorrow’s girlfriend in a balloon accident. The lyrics read like a collage of impressions of a tragedy that couldn’t be fully comprehended by the witness: “She throws down / lifeline of kisses / Anchored to the ground / Balloon descending / Then I see balloon is burning / Turning round burning.” It’s stark, evocative stuff.


Once you have absorbed S.F. Sorrow you should probably move on to Parachute, which is nearly as good. Yet again the band uses a loose concept as a blueprint for the record, with Side A offering an Abbey Road-like suite of city songs and Side B ruminating on country life. Yet again the album’s chief strength is the individual songs. Parachute is the Pretties’ album that is most similar to S.F. Sorrow, but their earlier R&B records are fantastic in their own ways, too. Their second album, Get the Picture, is the best of these, because it’s their first to host a string of thumpingly sublime originals— “You Don’t Believe Me”, “Buzz the Jerk”, “Get the Picture”—along with terrific covers of Ray Charles’s “I Had a Dream” and Tim Hardin’s “London Town”. “Can’t Stand the Pain” bears the first traces of the kind of psychedelia that would fully inform S.F. Sorrow. 1967’s folk-rocking Emotions is a very good one, as well, though not as consistent as these other records. But “Death of a Socialite”, “The Sun”, “There Will Never Be Another Day”, and “My Time” and are all essential.

September 7, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: Small Faces

Small Faces were one of the top acts in Britain in the mid-‘60s, right in the same sub-Beatles-and-Stones league as The Who and The Kinks. They had ten top-twenty hits, were ranked as the most legitimate mod group (The Who were basically squeezed into that mold against their will by über-mod manager Pete Meaden), drove pubescent girls crazy, helped pioneer the rock opera, and were integral to the eventual superstardom of Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. . Aside from scoring a minor hit with the whimsically psychedelic “Itchycoo Park” in 1968, Small Faces never really broke through in the States. Perhaps they were too English.

July 27, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: The Move

It’s hard to imagine anyone with more than a passing interest in the pyrotechnic pop of the Who or the Creation not being utterly inspired to delve into The Move discography, especially after being introduced to them via “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” and “Fire Brigade” on Nuggets II. These two tracks are fine representations of the Move’s cartoony humor, keening harmonies, heavy bottom, and utter Britishness. Bandleader Roy Wood is as notable for his eccentric songwriting and alluringly metallic voice and guitar tone as he is for his great big mustache (he also wrote, produced, and sang on the utterly Move-esque "Dance Round the Maypole" by fellow Nuggets band the Acid Gallery). Chief vocalist Carl Wayne is one of the most classically fine British rock singers, with a strong, clean vibrato. Drummer Bev Bevan rolls the toms like Keith Moon on a short leash.

Like many acts on the Nuggets compilations, the Move were essentially a singles band, and the initial run of 45’s they released between debuting in early ’67 with the psychotic two-header “Night of Fear”/“Disturbance” and putting out their first album in March of 1968 is as delectably tuneful and wildly fierce as the work the Who and the Creation released during the same period. A couple of these singles (“Flowers in the Rain” and “Fire Brigade”), along with their B-sides (“[Here We Go Round] The Lemon Tree” and “Walk Upon the Water”) made the grade on the Move’s eponymous first record. On its own, The Move is not the group’s strongest album: their cover of Moby Grape’s “Hey Grandma” is well-done but unnecessary, and their cover of the Coasters’ “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart”, poorly sung by Bevan, is awful. He does a more respectable job vocalizing on a peppy rendition of Eddie Cochran’s “Weekend”, but three is a lot of covers for an album released long after originals had become the “serious rock” standard. Of course, there is little evidence that the Move were serious about anything, what with their car and television-destroying stage antics.

Although it is a bit thin, you will want to pick up the first Move album eventually (especially in its double-disc incarnation on Salvo Records, which collects all of the group’s essential early singles), but the band’s best album from start to finish is their final one.



By the time the Move got around to cutting Message from the Country in 1971, they were quite a different group than the one that recorded The Move. Acid-enthusiast and bassist Christopher “Ace” Kefford had exited as far back as 1968, leaving bass duties to rhythm-guitarist Trevor Burton, who followed Kefford out the door the following year. That same year, Carl Wayne moved on (pun!) to start a solo career. Enter Jeff Lynne, who split songwriting, singing, producing, and guitaring duties with Wood on Message from the Country.

Although it’s short on hits, Message from the Country found the Move perfecting their numerous musical pursuits and compiling them into a collection that felt eclectic rather than merely random, as The Move did. “Ella James” and “Until Your Moma’s Gone” are examples of the heavy rock they started pursuing in the late ‘60s, but the album feels more like a return to the pithy singles of the band’s mid-‘60s hey day, which is a relief after the long-winded epics that dominated Shazam and Looking On (both 1970). “No Time” is the group’s most ethereal ballad. “It Wasn’t My Idea to Dance” is a killer fusion of hard rock and Moroccan arabesques (Jimmy Page and Robert Plant must have been listening). “The Minister” is a delirious rocker with a creepy-crawly riff. Bevan even makes nice use of his goofy basso profundo on the ‘50s R&R parody “Don’t Mess Me Up” and the Johnny Cash parody “Ben Crawley Steel Company”. Meanwhile, the title track and “The Words of Aaron” hint at what Wood and Lynne were planning to deliver with their soon-to-be-born Electric Light Orchestra, although ELO would rarely produce anything as tough and terse as these two tracks.

After Message from the Country, those who like their Move short and sharp will want to back up to ’68, grab the debut album, and stop there. More adventurous listeners should continue to Shazam, a demanding album for sure, but one that most definitely pays off with repeated listens. Aside from the stomping standard “Hello Susie” and the pretty throw-back “Beautiful Daughter”, everything on Shazam cracks the six-minute mark. The sudden shift in approach raises the question of whether this was an artistic choice or a consequence of dwindling material. The fact that the album includes a lengthy remake of “Cherry Blossom Clinic” from The Move might suggest the latter, but “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited” actually improves on the early version with a fuller, more powerful production, more assured playing, and funny instrumental run-throughs of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, and Tchaikovsky’s “Chinese Dance”. The nearly 11-minute “Fields of People” (“there’s no such thing as a weed”!) is a hilarious flower-power spoof that ends in a lengthy raga. “Don’t Make My Baby Blue” is the group’s most convincing slab of heavy-metal and “The Last Thing on My Mind” is another strangely beautiful ballad. Looking On is a far less essential collection of marathon-length tracks, although “What?” is excellent later-day psych and “Turkish Tram Conductor Blues”, “When Alice Comes Back from the Farm”, and “Brontosaurus” are all good pieces of heavy blues rock. Definitely not the place to get moving (pun!), though.

July 23, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: Paul Revere and theRaiders

In the autumn of 1972, future Patti Smith Band guitarist Lenny Kaye compiled a double-album that would help inspire the upcoming punk movement and revive interest in a form of music that had previously been dismissed as amateurish garbage compared to what more accomplished groups, such as the Beatles, the Stones, and the Beach Boys, were producing in the mid-60s. Of course, I’m talking about the American garage band/psychedelic one-hit-wonder comp Nuggets. After taking a gamble on the record, many listeners heard regional acts like New York’s the Vagrants, Boston’s the Remains, and Texas’ Mouse for the first time. Same thing goes for bands containing future stars, such as The Amboy Dukes (Ted Nugent), Sagittarius (Bruce Johnston), and Nazz (Todd Rundgren). Some of the songs actually were national hits, like the Standells’ “Dirty Water”, the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)”, and the Castaway’s “Liar Liar”, but few of these bands ever managed another one. Although most of the 27 tracks on Nuggets were unfamiliar, each one was a thrilling reminder of how fresh these third and fourth tier acts remained years after their fleeting careers had faded.

In 1998, the premier retro-rock label Rhino Records released a boxed set based on Lenny Kaye’s original vision that expanded those 27 songs to a staggering 118 and included better known acts like Paul Revere and the Raiders, Love, and the Turtles among the obscure ones. Three years later, Rhino released Nuggets II, which took Kaye’s concept international. I for one was inspired to check out groups likes the Smoke, the Action, the Move, the Pretty Things, Timebox, Les Fleur de Lys, and Marmalade after poring through this box sets’ 109 fiery tracks, and to call my effort rewarding would be an understatement.

In this new feature here at Psychobabble, I’ll be offering suggests about where to head next after discovering a band via Nuggets. Some of these should be pretty easy to write since a lot of these bands never got past their debut albums (and in some cases, they didn’t even get that far).

The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: Paul Revere and the Raiders
(represented on Nuggets by “Just Like Me” and “Steppin’ Out”)

I’ve decided to start with one of my personal favorite groups, and one that was not among Kaye’s original parade of oddities. In fact, Paul Revere and the Raiders scored an impressive nine top-twenty singles during their career (and when they’d shortened their name to the Raiders in the ‘70s, they even managed a number one hit with the MOR mediocrity “Indian Reservation”). But time has somewhat left Paul Revere and the Raiders behind, largely because the group was saddled with a goofy, bubblegum image forged by their insistence on wearing idiotic revolutionary war uniforms and their slapstick antics on Dick Clark’s Rock & Roll variety show “Where the Action Is”. Despite the Raiders’ sub-Monkees persona, they actually churned out some tough R&B-flavored garage rock and psych recordings, like “Steppin’ Out”, “Just Like Me”, the original version of “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”, “Hungry”, “Louie, Go Home”, “The Great Airplane Strike”, and “Him or Me (What’s It Gonna Be?).” Some of their material did veer more toward bubblegum, but much of this was as wonderful as their harder-edged efforts, such as “Cinderella Sunshine”, a heady synthesis of light-psychedelia and effervescent pop worthy of Brian Wilson or, at least, Andrew Oldham. As a band, they were blessed with a dramatic, magnetic belter and fine pop songwriter in Mark Lindsay, an inventive bassist in Phil “Fang” Volk, and a powerful, funky drummer in Mike “Smitty” Smith.

Paul Revere and the Raiders delivered the goods on their long players, too. The first time this is really evident is on Midnight Ride (1966), on which they sidestep the covers that dominated their earlier albums and deliver the strong originals “Take a Look at Yourself”, “Ballad of a Useless Man” by guitarist Drake Levin (who unfortunately died of cancer this past July 4th), and the menacing “Louie Go Home” (a vastly superior remake of a more R&B influenced version the group recorded for a 1964 single, which the Who later covered as “Lubie [Come Back Home]”). The album also contained the first versions of the future standards “Kicks” (the band’s signature hit) and “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” by the Tin Pan Alley songwriting teams Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, respectively.


Even with these scattered triumphs, Midnight Ride is dragged down by a couple of saccharine ballads, “Little Girl in the 4th Row” and “Melody for an Unknown Girl”. The place you really want to start with Paul Revere and the Raiders is their next album, The Spirit of ‘67 (released at the end of ’66, ironically). The album is buoyed by arguably the band’s three best hit singles: the Beach Boys-meets-the Stones corker “Good Thing”, the fuzzed out proto-pop metal of “Hungry”, and the mesmerizing groove-fest “The Great Airplane Strike”.

The rest of the album is nearly as good, with quirky pieces like “In My Community”, “Why? Why? Why?”, and “Our Candidate” jiving alongside a pair of melodramatic stabs at dark-Scott Walker balladry— “All About Her” and “Oh! To Be a Man” — and a pair of fantastic Revolver-era Beatles pastiches: “Undecided Man”, which lifts the slashing string octet from “Eleanor Rigby”, and the raga-parody “1001 Arabian Nights”.

With enough hits to draw in casual fans and a wealth of quality album tracks to keep their attention, The Spirit of ‘67 is the perfect spot to form a Raiders addiction, but my personal favorite of their LPs is Revolution! (1967), which includes the huge hit “Him or Me (What’s It Gonna Be)” (the equal of any hit on The Spirtit of ‘67) and the minor one, “I Had a Dream”. From end to end, it is the most consistently strong Raiders record, with thumping blasts of sugary R&B like “Reno”, the sublime “Mo’reen”, “Wanting You”, and the hilarious “Ain’t Nobody Who Can Do It Like Leslie Can” (a Revere-sung tribute to his maid). “Upon Your Leaving” is the band’s best ballad because it smartly retains their blues influence. The shimmering “I Hear a Voice” is their finest foray into psychedelia. “Make It With Me” has so much rumbling bottom it sounds as if the band is about to fall through the studio floor. Listeners who don’t require several anchors of familiarity to get into an album should definitely start with Revolution!.




Good places to head next would be Midnight Ride or Hard and Heavy (With Marshmallow) (1969, which is hampered by an idiotic title and annoying spoken-comedy bits between the tracks, but includes the phenomenal “Cinderella Sunshine” and some excellent Stonesy numbers like “Time After Time”, “Money Can’t Buy Me”, and “Without You”, as well as the bubblegum classic “Mr. Sun, Mr. Moon”.