Nuggets at 50: I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)

Nuggets Golden Jubilee Celebration: City Winery, NYC, July 28 & 29, 2023

I don’t know if it’s gauche to quote yourself, but:

“Nuggets was a collection of amazing garage rock singles recorded in the mid-1960s that, by the early 70s, had virtually disappeared…The compilation didn’t sell that well on its initial release, but over time it turned into a cultural lodestone, where knowing the songs and bands that appeared on the record signified a shared ethos and common understanding of the important rudiments of rock and roll music.”

Why Patti Smith Matters, p. 33

Last week I drove from Detroit to New York in order to attend the concerts in honor of the 50th anniversary of Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilations last weekend. The connection between Nuggets and the CBGB Class of 1975 is one of the few things almost all of those bands had in common; you probably heard bands cover those songs more than you did the actual songs themselves. I was 11 at the time all of that was happening so the place I heard those songs live was about 10 years later when I was head over heels with the New American Underground Class of 1985. I gravitated towards those bands for many reasons, but one of them was because I felt and heard a kinship with punk rock, and layered on top of that was Nuggets. The reissue of the record in the 80s meant I could finally get my own copy of it, after living with a taped cassette for a decade. Would we all know the Seeds “Pushin’ Too Hard” or the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” without Nuggets? Some of us would, but we definitely wouldn’t be singing “Dirty Water” after Red Sox games without it.

The songs on the record were the kind of thing that let you find your people, a way to easily find and identify the folks with whom you were going to share your vibe, your aesthetic, and understand what kind of thing you were trying to do. Steve Wynn talked about this during his time onstage, offering a heartfelt thanks to Lenny for the existence of the album, and how after he heard it, he put an ad in the paper: “Wanted: a band that sounded like the Standells and the 13th Floor Elevators.” This is how we eventually got Dream Syndicate, and everything else Wynn has contributed since that time.

The lineup for the NYC shows was a mix of old guard and new guard. So you had Patti Smith, Richard Lloyd, and Ivan Julian, but you also had Vicki Peterson, Bob Mould, Peter Buck, and Juliana Hatfield. And there were also an array of other folks for whom Nuggets was important or foundational and who wanted to be a part of the festivities - Tom Clark, Tammy Faye Starlight, Joe McGinty. What this show was not was not an oldies caravan, where the remaining originators got to have their moment in the spotlight; the LA version of this evening had some of that to offer, but that was mostly because of geographics. I mean, Todd Rundgren didn’t show up for either one but he lives in Hawaii (I only mention him because he was one of the first people I thought should be there but wasn’t).

They were all backed by Lenny, clad in a flowy psychedelic blouse that looked an awful lot like the design on the cover of the original Nuggets album, alongside Jimmy Mastro, Dennis Diken, Tony Shanahan, Jack Petruzzelli and Glen Burtnick. If anything, this band was almost too good for a bunch of garage rock but I am also not complaining. I think if I was disappointed by anything it was that these are songs that you want to hear in a dark bar when you’ve had a lot to drink and we were standing on a polished concrete floor at the new City Winery location while other people who paid $200 for the privilege sat at tables and ate salads and drank wine. But that is a complaint about the commodification of rock and roll in general, and not directed at the spirit of the evening.