SHINDIG! Lenny Kaye, NUGGETS, and Me

 

My good friend (and Radio Deer Camp host) Rich Firestone informed me that the latest issue of the ultra-fab British rockin' pop publication Shindig! quotes liberally (with proper credit) from my 1998 Nuggets interview with Lenny Kaye. I'm honored to be considered a worthy resource for this venerable magazine.

Although credited in Shindig! to a 2016 piece on this blog, my interview with Kaye was conducted in 1998. I was working on a piece for Goldmine, connected to Rhino Records' then-recent 4-CD Nuggets boxed set. The piece, "It Came From The Garage!," was intended to be a retrospective on '60s punk/garage rock and how Kaye's original 1972 Nuggets compilation led to a critical reappraisal of that period and its DIY approach. 

"It Came From The Garage!" was never finished. A Labor Day storm in Syracuse shut down power for several days, delaying work on the project. As time went on, changing visions at Goldmine made it apparent that my Nuggets piece was no longer a priority, and eventually no longer worth pursuing. I abandoned the project because there wasn't a project anymore.

In 2016, when my guano-crazy decision to maintain a daily blog created a voracious need for material, I posted my "It Came From The Garage!" interviews with Lenny Kaye, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, Sal Valentino of the Beau Brummels, Dick Dodd of the Standells, and Barry Tashian of the Remains. 

I also pulled out my notes from the abandoned project, and thought about trying to finally complete it. Some introductory paragraphs were as far as I got:

It was 1972, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Viewed in hindsight, the pop music scene of 1972 may not seem so bad, but it sure seemed devastatingly dull at the time. Rock 'n' roll, once a vital, effervescent explosion of vibrance and energy, had become boring, bloated; it had even shortened its name to something called "Rock," as if "rock 'n' roll" were too long a name and would distract its self-consciously progressive practitioners from their instrumental noodling if they dared take the time to say the name in full. Such verbal economy stood in stark contrast to rock stars' seeming inability to be succinct in any other regard: eight-minute songs, endless solos, double-albums, triple-albums...brevity had become a lost art by 1972. If you went to see, say, Yes in concert circa 1972, and you left early during a keyboard solo, you could probably be convinced that same interminable solo were still going on right now.

If rock had become dull and complacent, Top 40 pop was no better, embracing an increasingly mellow, whitebread vibe devoid of passion and excitement...and things were only gonna get worse. All of this over-simplifies matters considerably; there were certainly captivating rock 'n' roll records released in 1972, some of which were mere cult items (if that) and some of which were bona fide popular hits. Nonetheless, there was a palpable sense among some rock 'n' rollers that things just weren't as good as they used to be

For those folks, future salvation would come, paradoxically, from the past. Its manifesto would appear, incongruously, in the form of liner notes to a double-LP collection of 45s by one-hit--and no-hit--wonders from the '60s:

"This is the story of a transition period in American rock and roll, of a changeling era which dashed by so fast that nobody knew much of what to make of it while it was around, only noticeable in retrospect by the vast series of innovations it would eventually spawn, both in the way music would be listened to and the way it was constructed. When it began, the centrifugal force was AM radio; under three minute singles, imaginative/predictable packaging (depending on who, what and where), all carefully held within the easily-accepted confines of the music business. By the time the smoke was clear, some four years later, FM-oriented progressive rock would be in full sway of the pop vanguard, opening up new vistas in stylistic content, lyrics and even life-style. As rock and roll had been born, so it would be born again, by casually nudging the old off the side of the road, making way for a hemi-headed, decked and stroked, highly combustible juggernaut of the new."

With these words, writer, guitarist and rock historian Lenny Kaye quietly and unassumingly set the stage for a revolution. This was the opening paragraph for Kaye's liner notes to Nuggets, a two-record archival set released by Elektra in 1972, which collected 27 "original artyfacts from the the first psychedelic era,1965-1968." And while Kaye seemed to endorse the "new vistas in stylistic content, lyrics and even life-style" circa 1972, it was the spotlight he cast on an era a mere four years gone yet a million miles away from '72 that would shine like a beacon to those seeking its light. 

Released at a time when various-artists compilation LPs were mostly hawked by TV hucksters, and were generally either unimaginative oldies packages or unimaginative K-Tel gatherings of recent hits (or, worse, covers of recent hits, performed by The Sound Effects or some similar studio hack aggregation), Nuggets was perhaps the first rock 'n' roll archival work to possess a viewpoint, even a vision. "Nuggets worked as a kind of opposition to the dominant trends of the time," recalls Kaye, "by kind of re-focusing things on the short, sharp shock of the hit single. You know,the quick blast of energy, the guitar hook and the kind of in-your-face chorus. And basically--I know for me, at least--it kind of reminded me of why I started playing music in the first place."

I still think about finishing this off. Someday. It seems unlikely. But ya never know.

Meanwhile, my thanks to writer Andy Morten and the other good folks at Shindig! for keeping my Lenny Kaye interview alive. It's a nugget if you dug it. And I dig it the most. man.

Shindig! magazine is available from the publisher, from our friends at Kool Kat Musik, at Barnes & Noble, and at many independent outlets. It's the NOW sound, it's what's happening!

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