Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults

What hath Lenny Kaye wrought? Back in 1972, when the rock critic and future Patti Smith Group guitarist compiled the first Nuggets collection, few would've guessed that he was paving the way for a small cottage industry. Kaye's two-record anthology of "original artyfacts from the first psychedelic era" - which is to say: whacked out garage band cuts from '64-'68 - proved so influential to succeeding generations of would-be fuzztoners that it sparked all manner of legit and quasi-legitimate follow-ups, collecting increasingly more obscure sets (Pebbles, Back from the Grave, etc.) of energized out-of-touch attempts at approximating the drug-drenched sound of barely competent musicianship at its most experimental. In 1998, Rhino Records brought things back full circle by releasing Nuggets as a four-disc boxed set - first disc contained Kaye's original selection, while the remaining three added similar tracks by many of the same suspects - then following up with a four-disc collection of European Nuggets.

Clearly, there's a market of fanatics for this stuff - record store devotees who'd rather listen to the Barbarians than the Hives - and to meet this cult need, Rhino has turned over part of its boutique label, Rhino Handmade, to feed our sonic gluttony. The first of two recent Handmade releases, Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, culls 24 singles and album tracks from the voluminous Warner archives, and it delivers the goods. Clunkily profound lyrics and cheesy sonic effects (every time someone sings the word "high," you can rest assured someone on the board is gonna mess with it), chaotic guitar and wrongheaded attempts at approximating Sgt. Pepper, spoken interludes and strangely treated instruments. It's all there for the listening; you supply the incense and peppermint.

Most of this material isn't strictly garage, of course, but the sound of professional and nascent professional musicians, would-be poets and total poseurs, struggling to capture that golden vibe. The opening title track, "Hallucinations," isn't even the work of a young 'un: singer Baker Knight was a former rockabilly artist (who wrote "Lonesome Town" for Ricky Nelson), though you can barely tell by the flabbergasting guitar sound being laid by a group of cats who'd been rockin' together since 1956. The Tokens, best known for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," show up as both producers and performers here - as do future names like session king Jim Keltner and munchkin songster Paul Williams (in a band happily called The Holy Mackerell).

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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